How do you encourge your staff to improve your website?

Pay them to do so of course.

Last year I read an interesting book, Freakonomics where the author makes explicit many of the things regarding human motivation you probably implicitly knew in a very clear and entertaining way. This lead me to thing about the way my salary had been set in the past along with the targets of my colleagues.

One of the problems with asking your staff to improve your website is that just as you have trouble defining what is regarded as KPIs for your organisation, you then have to try and tie these things to individuals salary and targets.

An example of one thing I once saw was that the online sales people were given targets to increase sales and conversion as well as continuing to maintain the site with the regular BAU changes.

Increasing sales could be tough. In this situation, sales were separate to marketing and also to product marketing. All they really had within their immediate power was to change the website. One would think this a good thing, for them to increase sales there would need to be enhancements to the website.

However, two things were noticed by these individuals

• whenever a product was competitively priced in the market place, the online sales and conversion would dramatically increase regardless of changes to the website.
• whenever marketing made a big splash, sales would also increase but usually to the detriment of conversion.

The upshot of this was that they concentrated more on lobbying product marketing to produce "competitive products" as it was simply the easiest way for them to hit their targets than almost anything they could do onsite. If product marketing shifted in their favour, they would easily hit their targets, if they didn't, well they could hope that the general trend for increasing sales online would continue or else blame the "competitive landscape" and hope things would be better next year.

The point I'm getting to is that though their targets were directly tied to a key "KPI" for a retail website - its sales (and even its conversion), nothing about that KPI actually encouraged this team to do anything to improve the company website - nothing spelled it out for them.

Had it been my team, I would have liked to acknowledge that product sales can be price sensitive and also sensitive to marketing however this should not have stopped the team from being encouraged to change their site as much as possible during the year. I would have set lower thresholds for sales and conversion i.e. they must not go below X where X is linked to a combination of previous sales in previous period, offline sales of the same period (to provide indication of market performance) with the empahasis that they must have conducted a series of Y trials during the period as well as BAU changes.

The size of the trials is probably up for debate, obviously a bigger trial (on the homepage or registration form) could have a bigger negative impact on sales than a smaller piece of functionality but I would actually wish to encourage calculated risk taking through a formal test process and so would set an individuals size of trial and sales thresholds dependent on what contribution I believe their area plays on sales.

I would then assess the staff additionally from the perspective of the ease/number of tests
they performed, i.e. are they doing it effectively and efficiently combined with the revealing of any particularly useful insights. (things to consider would be number of tests, size of trials, impact of area changed)

So what I would be doing is encouraging a workplace where new ideas go hand in hand with accountability and individuals feel empowered to make a difference rather than having a lack of focus to update and improve their website.