Rewarding employee success and achievement
Your staff are your lifeblood. They get up every day. They come to work. They give you their absolute best. They hit all their targets and look after your customers -always with a smile. And in return, they don’t ask for much. But what they do want is success, recognition, and all the perks that go along with being the best. Not too much to ask, is it?
Unfortunately, a lack of engagement and a lack of recognition for the work they put in, are the most common reasons given at exit interviews by millennials. These reasons for leaving are totally avoidable. By the way, millennials will make up 50% of the workforce by 2020, so getting this wrong will be expensive!
So, you want to reward your employees for their hard work, effort, and dedication. You need to reward your employees for their hard work, effort, and dedication. But how?
It can be difficult to know where to start, and all too common to worry about how to come up with recognition schemes that are valued by employees but which also won’t break the bank. But it doesn’t always have to be about cold hard cash.
Here are 5 of my favourite reward ideas – guaranteed to pique your employees interest, and which also won’t break the bank!!
- Office Perks
Workplace perks are fantastic rewards. Not only do they cost you as a company very little, but they show recognition in the workplace to all your employees and create the kind of friendly camaraderie that grows successful companies.
In many workplaces, the ‘corner office’ or a manager’s office is a sign of respect and accomplishment. Lending out your space for a day or a week to an employee that has earned it transfers that level of respect to them. Like your office, a parking spot that’s close to the office or inside, shows a high-level of value and accomplishment. Give it up as a daily reminder of how you value them.
As an added bonus, you could even get a small sign with their name printed on it to show that the space is really ‘theirs’ for whatever period you are gifting it.
There are many ways to leverage the workplace experience as a reward mechanism – think creatively!
- A glimpse of the future
Why not gift your assistant? It’s a great way to recognise the time and effort your staff put in every single day. It also can become an aspirational experience, showing them how much time gets eaten up by administrative or menial tasks and how much they can actually get done when they have the opportunity to focus solely on the big picture.
Or else, you could source conferences/training that line up with what your employee is interested in (and what you want them to learn) and pay for them to go. Giving a hard-working employee access to the smartest people in their career path is a great way to give them the leg up in the workplace that they deserve – and is a great aspiration for other members of the team!
- The gift of time.
Giving a Friday afternoon off can give an employee a really valued jump start to the weekend. Yes, the rest of the team will be jealous when they start packing up at noon, but that’s the point. They’ve earned it. Likewise, giving a late start on a Monday lets them make more plans for the weekend. It also recognises them for their achievement when they come into work and can even make them happier all day long if it means an easier commute outside of rush hour. You could take this concept further and confer additional leave days based on performance, or even gift duvet days, for example. The sky, and your imagination, really are the only limit here!
- A better day
You can curry a lot of favour by gifting your staff with seemingly small improvements to their day. Why not give your employee a break from the commute – offer them the chance to work from home. Studies show that commuting ranks as the least favourite of all household chores! Show you trust them, and let them work from home!
5.. A well intentioned and Honest Thank You Note
Not all rewards need to carry a monetary value, and sometimes it’s the intangible rewards that carry a weight and value that inspire people; it’s often the small gestures that show most appreciation.
It might seem like a cop-out or a throwaway reward, but a well-designed and thoughtful thank you note can seriously motivate and propel workers to keep putting in their all. The key here is to put in the effort to show how much you appreciate the worker. A proper thank you note should be generous, specific, prompt, succinct and personal.
Without doubt, a clear, structured and well managed reward strategy can reap bountiful rewards for your business. It will motivate and boost productivity, help you retain your best staff and incentive new recruits. Want to chat some more to see how creative we can get for your business?
