It's common for Employee Rewards and Recognition Programmes to reward high sales or productivity. But what about some alternative categories?
Employee recognition and rewards have come to be an accepted part of working life. Nearly two thirds of UK businesses use non-cash rewards and recognition, according to the Incentive Research Foundation, showing just how accepted the practice is becoming.
However, although many businesses use employee recognition, their programmes may be going stale because they're always rewarding the same things. For example, how many rewards programmes have you seen that just give prizes for high productivity, sales or revenue generation? Although these are always going to be central to a recognition programme, they're not the only activities you can reward employees for.
Here are some of the reward categories you can introduce into your Employee Rewards and Recognition Programme.
1) Employee wellbeing promotion
Health and wellbeing at work is essential to creating a happy and engaged team. Unfortunately, employee health and wellbeing is not a consideration for over a third of organisations, according to a report by Cigna. One way to counteract this is by rewarding team members who go above and beyond in promoting wellbeing around the office.
For example, you could offer rewards for those who regularly post employee wellbeing and stress tips on social media. Or, try to promote a healthy work-life balance by rewarding teams that manage to get their work done by close of play each day as a means of discouraging those who work late all the time.
2) Corporate Social Responsibility and environmental efforts
You'll have heard Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) mentioned a lot in the news recently. CSR is now becoming a necessity for many businesses. Research by marketing agency Cone Communications found 64 per cent of young people won't take a job at a company with poor CSR practices, while 90 per cent of consumers would boycott a company if they learned of irresponsible or deceptive business practices.
One way to encourage CSR around your workplace is to reward teams for completing giving-back days or any other CSR efforts they may be pursuing. The same goes for teams and individuals that are being environmentally conscious, for example those who reduce printer usage.
3) Increasing brand awareness
Another category that certainly contributes to revenue but doesn't necessarily directly link to higher sales is the ability to increase brand awareness. This is much harder to measure than direct sales, however is a useful category of reward.
Ways to reward this include:
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Recognising teams for the amount of quality content they put on your website and social media.
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Rewarding those who get the most engagement (both likes and comments) on online posts.
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Recognising your marketing team for an increase in net promoter score.
4) Quality as well as quantity
It's common for reward schemes to centre on the amount of work an employee is producing. However, if your team are rushing to get their work done because they know they're going to get rewarded for it, they are unlikely to produce anything of good quality.
That's why it's important to reward quality work as well as quantity. One way to do this is by introducing an audit system that ensures all work is to a certain standard. Any employees who produce work above this standard, as well as who hit their production KPIs, can then get an extra reward.
If you'd like to introduce a rewards programme in your workplace, look no further than Power2Motivate. We have years of experience creating employee rewards programmes that work. Contact us today for more information or request a demo.