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Intuit Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is
April 04, 2007
By Leo Jakobson
April is a particularly apt time to profile the recognition programs run by Mountainview, Calif.– based Intuit, whose best-known product is TurboTax, the top-selling tax-preparation software in the United States.
With $2.3 billion in annual revenue, Intuit is expanding both its business line and global footprint beyond its American tax and financial-management software roots. As a part of this strategy, it recently added a software development office in Bangalore, India, to its U.S., Canada and U.K. locations.
"We are very keen on building a recognition culture," says Jennifer Lepird, Intuit's compensation business partner and recognition program manager. "Our philosophy is that recognition and performance improvement programs are a key part of our total reward portfolio, along with compensation and benefits. [Corporate] leadership is very supportive of these programs."
Supportive enough that the company budgets 1 percent of its total payroll to recognition programs. "That goes back to C-level support," says Lepird, who notes that founder Scott Cook still personally selects the winners of the company's top recognition program, the Founder's Innovation Award.
Spotlight, Intuit's main incentive program, has two components: a peer-recognition program for employees and a gift-certificate-based program that allows managers and executives to reward good work. In both cases, the employee's direct manager is notified. The programs are run online, on a platform built by incentive provider Globoforce, headquartered in Westborough, Mass., and Dublin, Ireland.
While Intuit has offices in just a few countries, it deals with many of the same problems faced by larger companies with more locations and has encountered many of the same pitfalls. The current Spotlight program uses gift certificates as awards, rather than merchandise as did a previous program. That merchandise caused Intuit two problems, Lepird says: shipping delays to offices outside the United States and dissatisfaction with the award selection. The latter can be a big deal at a software firm like Intuit, she adds. Tech-savvy employees want only the latest electronic gadgets and are used to finding discounts online that undercut the price-point the company attached to merchandise awards.
"We do not set goals" for the recognition program, Lepird says. "We do not measure return-on-investment. We empower managers to use their best judgment for what is worthy of an award." Which isn't to say the program's results are ignored. Intuit measures utilization rates and takes employee surveys seriously. When Spotlight was introduced in 2004, "utilization increased 400 percent over the old program in three months," Lepird says. Including peer recognition, 89 percent of Intuit's 8,100 employees received a recognition award in fiscal year 2006. "That's a huge penetration rate," she adds. "We know folks are using Spotlight and are connecting with it."
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