Motivating Employees through Reward and Recognition

Engaging employees in your workplace is important to ensure that they are productive and give you their best every day.  Engaged employees are more productive and less likely to leave their current employers and staff retention is something that every employer is concerned about in today’s employment market.  It is important to know that if you have employees that are not totally engaged in your workplace, you need to put in place ways of motivating them and having them aspire to better performance, effective reward and recognition programs.

All employees appreciate receiving reward and recognition for the contribution they make to the business. Recognising good performance or positive behaviours (like customer service or having a positive work attitude) is a good way of building a positive and collaborative team culture.  Performance recognition can happen in many ways, the overall objective should be to create a culture of recognition. The most common is the provision of a commission or “tips” to employees for sales or service. With a highly competitive labour market, it is becoming more important than ever for employers to consider more consistent and sophisticated methods of motivating and rewarding their employees.

For most employees money is a welcome reward for performance, but it may surprise you to learn that over 78% of employees would spend their bonus money on paying bills and other debts – hardly a lasting reminder of their good performance.  To provide employees with a longer lasting reminder of their performance, many employers are now considering rewarding employees with adventures, products and services that are tailored to the specific tastes of the employee.  For example, several hotels that have high levels of university students working for them have introduced performance incentives around paying for those employee’s HECS fees if they meet service and sales standards.  Other businesses are offering employees holidays, bridge-climbs, books, facials and spa retreats, in order to motivate them.

 There are several keys to effective reward and recognition:

-          Establish some clearly defined performance measures, or key performance indicators, that are tangible and measurable

-          Communicate clearly to the employees what is expected of them and the desired level of performance of their duties

-          Ensure that employees understand what rewards are available to them for meeting or exceeding their performance goals

-          Undertake regular performance reviews with employees so they know how they are tracking against their targets (you may want to consider quarterly reviews)

Don’t forget, performance indicators do not have to be individual, you can establish business goals, team goals and individual goals to ensure everyone understands that their role contributes to the overall organisational performance. Reward and recognition should also be given to employees who display desirable behaviours that link to company culture and objectives; this will help to cultivate the behaviours you want your employees to repeat.

Celebrate the wins openly with all employees.  This will allow those who miss their performance rewards to aspire towards being celebrated in the next round, as well as providing public reward and recognition of the great performance of those who are hitting their targets.