Any successful company understands that you can never stop improving your business’s practices. The most effective way to increase your company’s overall output is by targeting your individual employees to increase their productivity. You can do this by providing continual training, increased automated assistance, or simply by finding new ways to motivate them.
A common tool that businesses use to motivate their employees is performance incentives. If you manage a company where you’ve been exploring options to increase enthusiasm for work among your staff, learn what to consider when choosing the right team incentives.
What Motivates Them
The first step to building an incentive is understanding what motivates your employees to come to work every day. So take the time to speak with all your employees. You can hold one-on-one meetings for smaller companies, but for larger businesses, you can send out a survey or have team leads speak with their groups. If an incentive is unappealing to employees, they will be less likely to work toward it. But using the information you collect from these meetings, you can build a plan that employees are excited about and interested in.
Not All Employees Are the Same
When speaking with your employees, you most likely have some very different personalities working for you, regardless of how small your company is. Not all your employees have the same likes and dislikes, so they won’t all be motivated by the same things either. There is the apparent desire for a good salary at any job, but personal reasons for working are typically far more nuanced than that. So, you could consider offering a variety of rewards to choose from, so your team members can select the reward that interests them most. This more inclusive approach should entice more participation.
For smaller companies, you can take this idea even further by building individual incentive plans. If your business is able, offer rewards tailored specifically to each person. That way, your company’s employees will be even more motivated to achieve the incentive’s goals. An individual plan shows a high level of investment and appreciation for your employees that they will surely appreciate.
Align Incentives With Company Goals
When a company decides to offer incentives, it will want to build a targeted plan that aligns with the company’s goals. So, ask yourself, “What are we working toward?” If you’re a telemarketer or retailer, your end goal is sales. However, if you’ve recently made a push for customer relations, you could then build a rewards program around positive customer feedback. Rewards don’t need to correlate with sales directly, but you should be able to know who achieves those incentive goals and how it is improving your company.
If, over time, you have an incentive program in place that your team routinely achieves, but you haven’t seen an improvement in your company’s overall profit or practices, then a change might be necessary. You can avoid these pitfalls by researching the sectors in your company that need an overhaul and building goals that target the improvement of those divisions. Also, think of your incentive programs as a thing that you can change or alter as the business needs evolve.
Profit Over Production
Often, employee incentive programs will be production-based. The more you do, the better. But what you need to consider when choosing the right team incentives is not just how much team members produce; you’ll also need to consider the quality of work they do. At the end of the day, profit is the most important thing for a company, not how much they can produce. Tying the rewards to company profits will get the staff to care about the little things in the process.
A common problem for companies is that their employees are motivated by their paychecks, not their success. Some companies solve this by offering stock options. However, you can encourage employees to care about the bottom line without giving up valuable stocks with the profit-based incentive program.
Non-Monetary Incentives
Monetary rewards can often get lumped into a person’s standard compensation, making it seem less significant. However, with your personalized rewards, you can find non-monetary incentives that are more memorable. If the bonus doesn’t leave an impression, your team members might be less motivated to work toward it on a constant basis. Non-monetary incentives can leave a positive, memorable impact, motivating employees for time to come.
Show Your Appreciation
An incentive is meant to serve as a reward to show your appreciation for an employee’s hard work. So on top of giving them monetary compensation, don’t forget to provide them with a shout-out among the team. This congratulation makes the incentives more personal, exhibiting your appreciation for their value to the team.
Also, the public acknowledgment serves to remind the rest of the team that there is an opportunity waiting for them if they are willing to work for it. These subtle reminders are great motivators to push more employees to strive for the incentive goals.
Consistent and Frequent Rewards
If a reward seems too unattainable, it will seem more like a lottery than a realistic goal. So, you’ll want to find the fine line between a goal that’s hard to reach but not so grand that it can’t be frequently achieved. Once you have an effective program, there should be people achieving goals monthly, so employees always have the constant reminder of what’s possible. Success breeds success, and the more team members you have earning bonuses, the more other employees will want to join in on the fun.
Utilize Software for Assistants
It can be challenging for a business to track and then dole out incentive rewards in an accurate and timely manner. Management has its own responsibilities. Its members don’t have the time to comb over all your team members’ work histories, only to have to go through the proper channels to get your rewards approved. However, with Trucentive’s employee rewards program software, you can gain assistance in building referral incentives, sales incentives work, well-being gifts, anniversary awards, and more.
