Employee award programs are one of the best ways to increase employee productivity, but you need to implement them correctly for their success. Planning ahead is critical to ensuring that an employee rewards program is both motivational and fair. Properly done employee award programs gives employees goals to work towards while making them feel appreciated and valued.
You should make employee rewards programs available to all employees in the interest of fairness. This means that profit-generating centers such as sales may need a different class of reward from other centers such as accounting and administrative staff. By including everyone you avoid resentment in your staff. To avoid any complications, base the goals on merit rather than luck.
You can also decide to reward your staff by departments, people, or both. In general, individual rewards will motivate some employees more, but will also encourage competition. This type of reward is probably best suited towards sales staff, whereas clerical staff would probably be more suited towards a single goal.
Once you have decided how your employees will be rewarded and what they will be rewarded for, you need to decide on the rewards. While it is often cost-effective to use a product or service that the company itself is related to (such as a printer at a printer company) it’s often not motivating or exciting. The rewards should be something that genuinely gets the employees excited. When in doubt, even a small percentage of profit-sharing usually motivates employees significantly.
An example of a successful employee reward program is a program that gives sales employees a percentage of sales once they meet a specific sales cap. This rewards program will encourage the employees to meet and exceed their sales cap for personal gain. It will also boost their morale because they’ll feel they’re being rewarded for being good employees.
Another example of a successful program would be a program that gives an accounting department a small party if they come in under budget each quarter. This encourages the accounting team to work together to cut their budget so that they can all share in a reward. It will also make them feel like their efforts are being recognized.
There are almost limitless ways to create an employee reward program, and almost any reward program is better than not having one at all. As long as you listen to your employees and discuss what motivates them you should be able to both increase productivity and employee morale at once.