Maximising your reward and
recognition budget
How can employers make reward and recognition work during a recession? Here Derrick Hardman from Capital Incentives & Motivation discusses the steps organisations can take to maximise the impact of their reward and recognition budget.
It’s probably no great surprise to employers that, according to recent Accor Services research, just under half the workforce is dissatisfied with their pay and benefits while one third believe their package is not competitive. In addition, pay is the biggest work worry among UK workers with nearly half (46%) citing it as their biggest job-related concern.
And in the current tough trading climate, few employers can automatically raise wages or reduce working hours. Yet this doesn’t mean organisations can’t use rewards and incentives to relieve the burden on employees and reassure people that their work and effort is highly valued by the business.
An incentive to reward good work is a tried and tested way of boosting staff morale and enhancing engagement, and this is arguably more important and challenging than ever. With pressure on budgets and costs, reward & recognition schemes need to work even harder and be carefully focused, managed and measured. The principles are very much the same and so too are the tactics you can employ to ensure your incentive scheme hits the mark with your workforce.
- Cleary define and articulate the behaviour & results you want which reflect the business issues and challenges of today. It shouldn’t be a case of do we / don’t we have or continue with an employee reward & recognition scheme, but how should we align it to create the behaviour we need today. As an example, if the focus is on cost savings, engage with your employees and reward ideas for cost savings.
- Communicate effectively and frequently about the scheme. Launch your scheme with a bang to excite and engage the audience and make sure the rules are easily understood. Transparency is important so the scheme is seen to be fair.
- Engage your managers first. Whilst attention grabbing communication is great, successful reward schemes require managers who are fully engaged with the programme, equipped to ensure the message is getting through, and able to pass feedback across and back up the organisation.
- Select the right rewards for your incentive programme. Conduct research to establish what motivates people now (rather than offering the same reward as last year) or give recipients the chance to work towards a gift of their own choice, for example, vouchers or gift cards.
- Have lots of winners and reward all achievers. Recognising and rewarding all those who achieve promotes a more positive environment than one with lots of losers - ‘Ripples in water’. Consider frequent awards with lots of categories so everyone has an equal opportunity to be successful.
- Present awards publicly. Recognise efforts and achievements at company meetings and encourage presentations by senior managers, again creating ripples of positive attitude.
- Evaluate the incentive scheme regularly. This will ensure objectives are being met and will enable you to refine and enhance the programme before its next successful launch.
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