4 Pieces of the Employee Recognition Puzzle: 2- Reward and Motivate with Incentives

Rewarding your top performers has never been more important. The economy has been through its ups and downs over the past few years, and the value put on high performance cannot be overstated. Being able to do more with less is the progress successful businesses have made. Doing more with less money, and doing more with less manpower also, of course.

Don't be shocked if your top performers are being lured away as the economy turns around. The best way to avert the crisis of losing them is to make sure they are properly compensated, rewarded, and recognized for their accomplishments and contributions to the company.

While trying to do more with less, you also want to maximize the contribution from ALL of your employees. Some might be disillusioned with their positions, but not feel safe enough to try to move to another company. This is almost the worst case for your company. It hurts to have people who only do enough to get by. As a company, you might feel stuck with this person, or not even know how bad it is because you are trying to avoid the high cost of turnover in one or multiple positions, or even avert a lull in productivity it would take to train a new hire. This is where incentives can be huge.

Incentives can motivate your lower performing employees to higher production levels than they would normally try to achieve, and properly compensate the highest performing members of your team. The more they perform, the more they receive in rewards. It is in the employees' control how much in rewards they receive.

To maximize the potential of incentives for your employees, the incentives need to be 1) Desirable and 2) Attainable. As in any setting for motivation, the end goal and reward must be worth the effort. Gift desirable rewards, and the motivation will be instilled. Setting goals for incentives that have never been close to being reached is not only discouraging employees to not participate, but it can actually have even more of a negative effect than not having incentives at all.

In an incentive program, it is important to make the goals attainable and quantifiable. A "good" action cannot be a qualification for an incentive reward. Make the rewards specific, and put higher value on the actions that more directly affect the bottom line of the company.  Be careful not to neglect elements like administrative tasks, or other actions that benefit the bottom line more indirectly. To be a successful company, all parts must work together and have emphasis. Incentives are a great way to "grease the squeaky wheel", if you will and get moving in the right direction.

To view examples of reasons to reward view our company blog on Incentives.

To learn more about a customized Incentive Points Program full of desirable rewards, check out BukooGifts.com.