Witnessing the chaos that has taken place over the opening of Heathrow Terminal 5 over the last few days is a salient warning over the dangers of launching a new system, as we are preparing to do with iD-points.

The madness and confusion that has reigned at T5, due to issues with the baggage system, has been not only a PR disaster for British Airways and British Airports Authority, but also a financial disaster, potentially costing billions of pounds.

There are lessons that we can learn from the T5 meltdown, and we will be applying all of these as we look to roll-out the new version of iD-points.

1. Problems occur in unexpected ways

Launching a new system, like opening a new aiport terminal, is a complicated business. Problems will spring from unlikely sources. In the case of T5, who could have predicted that the lack of security guards admitting baggage handlers to their carpark would be one of the root causes? Small details can have a knock on butterfly effect, which in the case of T5 led to delays and confusion, then to flights departing with no baggage, and finally dozens of flights cancelled altogether.

No matter how elegant the grand plan, the devil is in the details.

2. Dont make a drama into a crisis

Once things started to go wrong, BA and BAA handled the situation terribly, creating more confusion, anger and resentment amongst passengers. Inevitably they have been blaming each other.

Customer service is always the key, no matter how good the product. As we have always said, you only really find out whether customer service is any good when there’s a problem.

Some of BA’s fall from grace may have had something to do with the overconfident tone set by BA’s and BAA’s marketing machine. Back in September 2007, Geoff Want, director of ground operations at British Airways, boasted:

“We’ve six months left before we start using this building and we can’t wait. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. In the next few months we are going to test every aspect of it so it will work perfectly from day one.”

Meanwhile the Terminal 5 website at features a rolling slideshow of the calming concourse, ‘effortless transfers’, 10-minute check-in, and a baggage system “ready for what’s ahead”.

This gulf between hype and reality is not only insulting but it is also an abuse of trust. It’s better to prove how good things are than boast how good they’re going to be.

3. Slow rollouts are preferable to big launches

Who knows why such a large number of BA flights were switched across to T5 at once, rather than a slow transition from one terminal to the other. Economic pressures mean that BA are looking to move all their flights across to T5 by April 30th – an aggressive schedule that leaves almost no margin for teething problems, let alone scenes of grand chaos central. But I suspect that there was also a desire to create a fanfare event, a grand spectacle. It was a risky decision which has backfired spectacularly.

4. Stress tests are essential

One has to doubt whether enough testing and training took place in T5. It would have been a good idea to run more ‘stress tests’, ie running the airport as if it were in operation, but with staff and ‘actors’ rather than fare-paying customers to make sure all parts of the process of check-in, departure and arrival were working smoothly.

The emergency services regularly stage mock incidents to test their procedures, skills and grace under pressure – this seems to have been lacking at T5. Likewise in web application development proper testing involves load testing the system with simulated traffic levels, dummy data, and live beta testing before being deployed to the actual user base.

The new version of iD-points is our T5. Let’s make sure it goes a lot smoother!

Everyone is obsessed with change, but there’s nothing worse than empty rhetoric. Change has become an overvalued commodity, change for the sake of change, with almost no consideration of what is going to be changed and to what.

As they say, the more things change the more they stay the same.

Check this out. Apparently, Hillary Clinton “embodies change”, while Milt Romney has “brought change for the last 25 years”, but I think he might have been referring to his lunch money.

If there’s a serious point to make here, then make sure if you are looking to change behaviour with an incentive, be clear what the new behaviour should be. For corporations, behaviour change has to also be good for the bottom line.

How much would you value not having to do a 2-hour round-trip commute to work?

Flexible working practices are gaining ground as the means of improving employees work-life balance and improving staff retention. Mobile telecommunications and cheaper laptop computers mean that knowledge workers no longer need to be chained to a desk.

But a study by the UK’s City & Guilds and Institute of Leadership & Management has concluded that many managers are suspicious of employees working from home.

As reported in Management Issues, managers may outwardly support more flexible working patterns:

“but scratch the surface and managers remain deeply unhappy about letting employees out of their sight, much preferring to manage a team that is physically sat there in front of them.

The research has found that, while nine out of 10 managers said they trusted remote workers and three quarters recognised they were more productive, a significant minority admitted they were still unable to break their old-fashioned “presenteeism” management style.

This was despite the fact that new technology was making remote working a much more viable option.”

As we have previously asserted, work is not somewhere you go, it’s something you do. Attempting to enforce mid-20th Century working practices based on Taylorist time-management principles is doomed to fail.

The old image of the ‘helicopter’ boss, hovering demoniacally over his staff, will give way to a more enlightened, assertive boss, using communication technologies positively to monitor performance and productivity, and engage with staff.

Incentives are an essential part of the new work economy, rewarding productivity, encouraging proactive behaviours, and helping staff set their own goals. Online systems such as iD-points can operate seamlessly across a distributed organisation, wherever it’s staff may be.

But these systems can also to build an element of community amongst users. Using the news feature to announce winners of monthly performance awards, for instance, is a good way to highlight the success stories of the company, and to emphasise a shared endeavour.

In 50 years time, the idea of a corporate office building may be as alien as a Victorian workhouse is to us today. The rules of engagement between staff and employers are changing. Heads-up companies will plan to promote self-sufficiency, look to hire self-motivated staff, and inspire them further with well structured, tactical incentive campaigns.

Remember, iD-points can be spent on IT equipment for that tricked out home office!

Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do.

Stories of organisations using rewards as a means of reducing absenteeism, such as the scheme implemented for the Royal Mail, are usually heralded as demonstrating the power of incentives to change behaviour.

I’ve always felt a bit uneasy about this kind of incentive, and at first I though this was because it’s not rewarding a positive behaviour. But I’ve realised that the real problem is that it rewards attendance rather than performance.

An interesting article at Business Week looks at how American electronics retailer Best Buy has implemented a Results Oriented Work Environment at its’ corporate headquarters, judging people on their performance rather than the hours they are at work.

Work place productivity is a myth, generally based around paranoid management who believe they can’t control what they can’t see. But there are so many distractions in the workplace, from web surfing, dealing with e-mail fire-storms to water-cooler summits and office chair jousting, its possible to spend a day at work without getting any work done..

With ROWE, people are not only free to work when they want, but where they want. There are no mandatory meetings and no schedules, which leaves employees to manage their jobs around their lives, not the other way around.

“The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done”

Many organisations are also realising that freeing their staff from their desk is a great way to reduce the requirement for office space:

“Sun Microsystems Inc. calculates that it’s saved $400 million over six years in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of all employees to work anywhere they want. And this trend seems to have legs. A recent Boston Consulting Group study found that 85% of executives expect a big rise in the number of unleashed workers over the next five years.”

With ubiquitous wireless networking, cheap laptops, and mobile telephony, the idea of commuting to a central office space to spend all day on the phone or computer terminal seems more and more archaic. The role of the office will doubtless change to a more informal, fluid zone for face to face exchanges and collaborative working.

Can a ROWE model also be applied to a retail environment or shop floor, where staff do not have the same flexibility of work patterns? Yes, according to Phyllis Moen, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota, in this article:

“It’s not about being free to come and go,” she says, “but being free to come and go based on getting the work done, so covering the show floor will necessitate coordinating with others. It’s a revolutionary idea.”

Modern performance rewards and incentives will need to adapt to the new realities of the new workplace. With the work-life balance that ROWE offers, incentives will be used to target different behaviours, and assist in helping employees acheive their self-set goals.

In any incidence with mass casualties and limited medical resources, doctors and paramedics face the uneviable task of choosing whom to treat first. The triage technique is used to identify those who are most likely to benefit from medical attention, versus those who will probably survive regardless of medical intervention, and those who are unlikely to survive even with medical aid.

When planning an incentive activity, you can divide your workforce or sales network into three groups. There are those who are already motivated regardless of the incentive campaign, and those who will not be motivated by the particular campaign activity. Then there is the third group, those who can be influenced by the reward programme. It is this third group that the incentive campaign should focus on.

Targeting the incentive activity to those who will benefit most from it makes sense from a Return on Investment point of view. The key issue is in understanding the workforce, in order to determine who is in this third group.

One of the ways we find effective at iD-points is to require users to register for an incentive. That way they are engaged with the incentive program – they are motivated to join it.

Using surveys and knowledge test are other great ways of increasing user engagement with a campaign.

But the triage approach also shows that one size does not fit all. Different approaches are needed to drive greater performance from those who are already motivated, and those who are not. This requires finding out what does motivate these groups, and finding appropriate campaign structures and rewards.

Organisations need to run multiple campaigns to tackle different attitudes to motivation and different performance requirements.