Teamwork is essential to your organisation's success. How can you use Employee Rewards and Recognition Programmes to promote effective teamwork?
Open plan offices, the agile methodology, collaboration and creativity. Everywhere you look, businesses are pushing teamwork as the principal means to get results. Why then do so many rewards schemes focus solely on individual achievements? While recognising employees' individual contributions is extremely important, it's also essential to reward teams as teams, especially if you're one of the many companies that places collaboration as one of its core values.
How can you use your Employee Rewards and Recognition Programme to boost team spirit at your organisation?
The psychology of teamwork
There is a significant body of research on how team spirit motivates employees. For example, a study at the University of Iowa found that people's desire to please other employees is one of the greatest forces behind a team achieving its goals.
Throw a team reward into the mix, and you take a team's desire to please each other to another level.
"We found that self-managing teams exhibit increased performance when they are highly cohesive," says Greg Stewart, Henry B. Tippie Research Professor of Management and Organizations in the UI Tippie College of Business. "Peer pressure is a strong motivating force, and workers' willingness to please people who mean something to them is often a stronger motivating force than financial rewards."
Throw a team reward into the mix, and you take a team's desire to please each other to another level. Each employee will know that a team reward is at stake, and work extremely hard to achieve that, thus fulfilling their motivating desire to please each other. This gives the team a shared vision and goal (achieving that reward), which will help them act more cohesively in an effort to achieve it.
The benefits of rewarding teams
If you introduce an element of team recognition on top of your usual individual rewards, you stand to see many positive benefits. Firstly, you will see an increase in team spirit. For example, offering team outings, events or even travel will help bring team members even closer together as they will get to know each other better outside of work.
And, with 86 per cent of respondents to a Salesforce survey citing lack of collaboration or ineffective communication as a key reason for workplace failures, your team's ability to interact with each other is essential to your organisation's success.
86 per cent of respondents to a Salesforce survey citing lack of collaboration or ineffective communication as a key reason for workplace failures.
Another benefit of rewarding teams is that it makes their work visible to the rest of your business. When you communicate their achievements on your company's social media platform, for example, it will let other employees in the business know exactly what it is that team does. This will then encourage other teams to choose them for projects, thereby promoting cross-collaboration between departments.
Teamwork is essential to an organisation's success. Creating a rewards structure that celebrates individual achievements as well as groups' is one of the best ways to promote collaboration - not just within that team but across your whole business.
Employee Rewards and Recognition Programmes with Power2Motivate
If you'd like to introduce an Employee Rewards and Recognition Programme at your organisation, give the team at Power2Motivate a call today. We offer top down and peer-to-peer platforms to make rewarding your employees as far-reaching as possible.
Our global rewards gallery offers thousands of different prizes. From events, travel, electronics and household appliances, there's something for all your employees. For more information, request a demo or contact us today.