Just a note on the continuing decline of the English language in corporate America.

In my company, executives have been groping for years for a word that means 'to encourage by use of incentives.' In other words, a verb to fill in the blank in a sentence like, "We want to [***] our employees to achieve our goals."

But 'encourage' is too weak, since the connotation they're going for is that we're giving people things (key rings, t-shirts, etc.) for doing good work; and 'encourage' seems like a vague pat on the back or a few words.

So 'incent' was tried out for a while, accent on that second syllable, please. "We incent our employees with bonus pay." But the backlash was felt, and the neologism was discarded.

I got a memo yesterday, though, from a manager who was pleased that a particular program was 'incentifying' his employees.

I really dislike both words, but does anyone have an established word that can fill the breach?