The Power of Recognition & Why Employee Incentives Rule
Your company’s success depends on your employees’ performance.
To retain a quality workforce, you need to maintain company morale and offer opportunities for recognition and growth.
How do you create a mutually beneficial environment that encourages professional development and teamwork, while challenging workers to excel?
One effective way of meeting your goals and boosting company performance is with employee incentives.
Here is how incentives can work to help your business achieve its maximum potential.
The Power of Employee Incentives
Why are employee incentives often used in employment retention plans?
Because they work.
Why do incentive programs work?
Because they satisfy people’s need of recognition for extending extra effort.
Financial rewards, such as increasing one’s pay or adding bonuses to their check, is often believed by well-meaning employers to be enough. And while adequately compensating employees is crucial to increasing loyalty, it’s not everything.
Money doesn’t give your employees their time to shine. It doesn’t provide them attention for a job well done. Financial rewards often are silent ways of showing appreciation, but incentives give employees a chance to be publicly recognized and celebrated for their role in company success.
People are driven by experiences and feelings. When they feel appreciated, it makes the experience more meaningful.
Recognition is a powerful motivator. If you want your employees to go the extra mile, you need to give them a good reason to reach higher.
How to Create Incentives
1. Set Goals for Employees
Use your incentive program to help your company excel by setting clear goals that contribute to overall success.
This not only gives your employees an idea of what to work towards, it also minimizes room for favoritism or biases, which can contribute to an overly competitive and hostile atmosphere. When there is a clearly defined goal to achieve, it eliminates leader prejudices because the incentive is reserved for whoever meets the goal. Fairness is paramount in any effective incentive program.
2. Encourage Teamwork Towards Achieving Goals
Incentive programs can be used to boost morale and help foster relationships among coworkers when the goal requires teamwork.
This will also keep workplace jealousy at bay because the winning team is not exclusive of just one worker. When staff relationships are strong and people enjoy working together, they are more likely to feel connected to their jobs.
By setting team oriented goals, you can accomplish wins for the company while encouraging positive work relationships at the same time.
3. Choose Valuable and Appropriate Employee Incentives
You can’t reward employees whenever they get to work on time, but you can reward perfect attendance for the month. Make sure that the goals you set to reward are appropriate and worth recognizing as exemplary performance standards.
Also, be sure to choose incentives that your employees will value. Most employees won’t be compelled by another company pen. But everyone appreciates being awarded time off or a free meal. If you want your employees to work for something it should be something that they will want to work for.
Wrap Up
When you have employee incentives in place, your employees will feel acknowledged and driven. You will notice the benefits of recognizing hard work, and you will gain loyalty that is vital for your company’s growth.
Need help hiring motivated employees? Get in touch!