A rewards and recognition program can help employees gain motivation and feel appreciated in the workplace, but as the Globe and Mail reports, many employers have scaled back such programs. Just as the economic downturn has led to wage freezes, bonus cuts and staff reductions, it has also affected reward programs.
Citing a survey of managers and employees by OfficeTeam, the paper says 33 percent of workers in North America feel their manager fails to recognize them. The trend continues across the ocean as well – a PricewaterhouseCoopers poll from February found the same percent of British workers say they have not felt valued by their employers during the recession.
“It takes time to know what motivates your employees and reward them appropriately,” Daphne Woolf, managing partner of the human resources consultancy Collin Baer Group, told the paper, “but when [managers] do it, it has such great impact.”
Released early this year, the PricewaterhouseCoopers study of 950 employees found there was a variety of reward options besides increased pay that interested employees. For example, 82 percent said they would value the option of earning a technology gift such as a digital camera or MP3 player, and 60 percent said they would be interested in tickets to leisure or sporting activities.
There is an unfortunate perception of difficulty in starting even a basic incentive/motivation program. We recommend starting small in order to see what the responses are from your employees. Gift Cards are a simple and low cost way to test a new program. Companies like National Gift Card (NGC) are able to offer the incentive community hundreds of different gift cards from your employees’ favorite retailers and restaurants. Many of these gift card options are available in the $5 – $10 range. In addition, NGC offers discounts on all orders, which would allow you to test various gift cards to see which have the highest perceived value to your employees.
With any incentive and motivation program, instant gratification is very important, but giving an employee a spot reward of YOUR choice and not THEIRS may result in the opposite intended reaction. Why not give your employee the gift of choice – the gift of gift cards. Why not give them the ability to choose their reward and have that reward still carry that instant gratification feeling. In addition, new technologies like e-certificates are paving the way for program administrators to easily manage and quickly distribute rewards.
While everyone responds differently to different rewards, I feel the recognition element has the most fundamental impact on motivation – the reward element can have varying influence. Cash, debit card, gift card, non-cash/merchandise and travel reward formats, can be effective if the program is designed correctly – we favor a points-based system that allows employees to accumulate points and save them towards rewards, creating a sense of equity and allowing a win-win: the company can create a number of affordable point rewards for a variety of desire behaviors – and employees have the ability to spend/save their points on rewards of their choosing.