A sorry tale from the pages of The Guardian, of the embarrassment and confusion caused by high street retailer Debenhams, which issued vouchers offering "£10 off your next purchase when you spend £25 or more at Debenhams", then refused to honour them:

"Lured in by the offer, customers have been turning up at the tills with their £25-plus worth of items, only to be told there has been a "printing error" and that they cannot have the discount unless they spend at least £50. Staff are pointing to the small print on the back of the voucher which states that customers need to spend £50 to get £10 off."

Shoppers have been embarrassed and angered when unable to redeem their vouchers. However, while this may appear to be a "misleading price indication" - a criminal offence under the Consumer Protection Act 1987 - shoppers cannot demand that the vouchers are honoured.

Vouchers and coupons often create a zone of uncertainty upon redemption - especially the multi-retailer 'Monopoly' money vouchers that inexperienced sales staff will not have encountered before. Can you redeem a Book Token for a magazine in Borders, for instance? I would never attempt to spend a voucher without having a credit card handy as backup, just in case. This uncertainty, and the embarrassment of refusal, helps contribute towards a non-redemption rate of vouchers which could be as high as 30%. That's right - up to 3 in 10 vouchers in the UK never get spent.

It seems Debenhams staff don't have much clue in regard to to the use of its gift vouchers either. On the consumer review site Dooyou.co.uk, a woman reports her unsuccessful attempt to redeem 4 vouchers, and was told only 3 could be spent per transaction.

"I gave the assistant the 4 vouchers and £5:50 only to be told that I could only spend three vouchers in one transaction. So I had to put £15:50 towards the perfume and take the one of the vouchers home. I was gob smacked."

If this lady has received these vouchers as part of an incentive scheme, it just lost all of its motivational benefit.

It's time to face the truth. Vouchers are tired and expired.

The example of an incentive program on The Incentive Markeing Association website, is a dog.

"Stan supervised a group of 50 people. He did a little research and came to the conclusion that each employee used an average of 10 sick days per year. He felt this seriously cut into productivity on the assembly line and he figured that cutting this figure in half, or 5 days per year, would greatly improve production figures for his department."

The aims of the incentive might be laudable - to improve productivity - but the solution chosen - to improve attendence and reduce sick days, tackles only the symptoms, not the cause. Note that Stan spends no time trying to find out or understand why employees are taking sick days.

So Stan kicks off his little incentive "with a small party of donuts and coffee" - the best aspect of the incentive, incidentally - and, lo, in this fictitious scenario, gets the results he is after. But of course his incentive also punishes those who are genuinely sick, and may also encourage people to come to work, who should really be at home, possible spreading more illness. No mention is made of staff in other departments who are not part of the incentive - a divisive strategy that may affect the overall attendence levels and productivity of the business.

The biggest trap Stan's incentive falls into is to award attendence, not performance. Those that turn up to work have no additional incentive to work harder or smarter, or otherwise perform better.

The incentive also offers nothing beyond the reward, except the impromptu recoginition ceremony. There is no attempt to engage the staff in a dialog about performance, teamwork, and attendence.

Stan has also given himself a nasty admin overhead. Not only does he have to calculate which employees to reward, from the attendence records, which is not too much of an issue, but he has had to "put together a catalog of gifts" in an appropriate price range. Not only that, he'll have to deal with collecting the orders, arranging delivery, and dealing with any issues regarding faulty items, returns, stock availability, plus irate employees who will complain that there's nothing they like.

Plus he has got to try and calculate the ROI from his incentive. Stan has got some long evenings with Excel ahead of him.

The article concludes that "Stan decided to run a similar incentive program the following year", but here's a crazy idea Stan. Why not try offering free coffee and donuts first thing every morning, and ditch the rest of the incentive?

If Stan's company is serious about improving productivity, it needs to come up with a company-wide incentive solution that does more than just reward. It should find some one to run it for them, and free Stan's time up to focus on what they are trying to achieve, and how to use rewards to drive staff engagement.

As reported in this recent BBC news piece, as many as four in ten employees are considering quitting their job in the next year, according to YouGov research for Investors in People.

"A lack of motivation at work is cited as a major problem, with unreasonable workloads, feeling underpaid and a lack of career path being blamed."

Employees feeling detached, unsupported and with no clear direction are symptoms of poor communication, leading to de-motivation.

"De-motivation was highest within larger companies, the report said, with 39% of people in organisations of 5,000 or more saying that they were either not very or not at all motivated compared with 30% in organisations of between 50 and 250 people."

Employee motivation is not just good for morale, it's good for the bottom line, both in terms of productivity, but also because hiring staff is an expensive business. It costs many times more to recruit and train good staff than it does to retain them.

Any successful motivation and incentive activity has to have, at its heart, communication. Rewards are a means to generate attention, and open a channel of communication. Giving rewards without communication is meaningless and in the long run won't improve employee motivation or performance.