Personalized incentive plans through employee profiling

Total reward management (TRM) is a holistic practice that interprets the growing need in organizations for involvement and motivation of the workers. It is oriented towards pushing the use of Information Technology in supporting the improvement of both organization and people performances, by understanding employee needs and by designing customized incentives and rewards. Customization is very common in the area of e-commerce, where application of profiling and recommendation techniques makes it possible to deliver personalized recommendations for users that explicitly accept the site to store personal information such as preferences or demographic data. Our work is focused on the application of User Profiling techniques in the Total Reward Management context. In the Team Advisor project we experimented the analogies Customer/
Employee, Product, Portfolio/Reward Library and Shop/Employer, in order to provide personalized reward recommendations to line managers. We found that the adoption of a collaborative software platform delivering a preliminary reward plan to the managers fosters collaboration and actively supports the delegation of decision-making.
We observed how the recommendations could act as a valuable starting point for the managers who need support in an activity they are not used to perform, by providing a means for unleashing unexpressed and undiscovered connections among the various elements that govern the reward assignation process.[…]
Starting from the results achieved in the prototypical phase, the Team Advisor working group is committed to perform both a technical and an organizational evaluation of a commercial version of the software developed. […]
For what concerns possible future software developments, the group is aiming at embedding new functionalities capable of collecting live user feedbacks on the recommendations, and use them in order to refine the process of profile generation. This will enable the system to become a dynamic engine of employee profiling, thus supporting the organizations in refining and sharing the knowledge about its human capital.

This paper is the latest Cézanne’s contribution to the scientific debate on the Total Reward Management issue. The work is the result of the cooperation of Cézanne research team with the Department of Management Engineering of Polytechnic of Bari and the Department of Computer Sciences of University of Bari within the European founded research project “Team Advisor”.
The paper has been presented during ICEIS 2006 (8th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems) on 23-27 May 2006 in Cyprus.


The authors
Silverio Petruzzellis
Cézanne Software S.p.A.

Oriana Licchelli, Ignazio Palmisano, Giovanni Semeraro
Dipartimento di Informatica - Università di Bari

Valeria Bavaro, Cosimo Palmisano
DIMeG, Politecnico di Bari

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