Offering incentives to employees can be a great way to help them to be at their best while improving loyalty and making your company a more fun place to work. It can encourage friendly competition too, which can lead to employees all improving in productivity together as they each try to bring their best selves to the workplace.
But different people find motivation from different sources, and it falls to you as a manager to figure out what inspires different people and to offer up incentives accordingly. Here are just a few of the main business incentives that get people motivated.
1. Recognition
A lot of people end up overthinking things and trying to provide some sort of monetary incentive to employees, but often the best kind of incentives are those that simply recognize people for the contributions they’ve made to the business. You can do this at team meetings or even with a formal recognition program.
2. A Promotion
You might want to save this one for the employees who consistently perform well because if you promote everyone who does a good job then you’re going to run out of room at the top of your company. Rewarding consistent top-performers is a good idea though, because then you show that performance itself will be rewarded with a boost in status, income and responsibility.
3. Cruises and Company Retreats
One of the best ways to reward your employees is to offer up cruises and company retreats or even to hold a corporate event where you invite friends of the company to mingle with staff in a more social setting. This has the added bonus that as well as rewarding employees for performance and increasing their morale, it can also lead to serendipitous meetings and even end up making you some money.
4. Time Off
If people have been working overtime to get the job done or even if you think they’ve just earned a break, giving people time off in lieu of overtime gives them the opportunity to rest and recharge or even just to go to an event that they might otherwise have missed out on.
5. Cash rewards
Cash rewards should be used as a last resort, and a better alternative is often to give employees gift cards to popular services like Amazon so that they can treat themselves to something instead of just using it to pay their rent. Still, while cash rewards and vouchers might not be perfect, they can also be worth considering.
Conclusion
Remember, these are just a few ideas to help you get started, and if you can think of other creative ways to reward people then by all means test them out and see how they’re received. You can even ask employees what they want to see to get a feel for what kind of rewards are most likely to motivate them to work harder and to deliver better results for the company. Good luck.
To read more on topics like this, check out the business category.
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