Staff incentive schemes are useful for a variety of purposes, such as gathering new ideas and ways to improve your business to sales targets. What better place to get that information than the ‘nuts and bolts’ of any business: your employees. Employee motivation is essential to obtain relevant and accurate information.
How do you get over the feeling that staff incentive schemes are nothing more than extra work with little recognition or reward from employees for their efforts?
With communication. Help your employees understand the value of an employee incentive plan by telling them what you want to achieve, why you want to achieve it, how you plan to achieve it, and demonstrating how they can play a role in the success of your business. Get them involved. Ask them to ‘get’ the purpose behind the Employee Incentive Program and then reward them accordingly.
Below is an overview of how to make staff incentive schemes work.
1. Know your goals
Before you set up a staff incentive plan, you need to know what the business goal is. What aspect of your business are you trying to improve? Maybe you’re trying to cut costs, improve customer satisfaction, increase sales or gross profit margin. Then establish how the incentive scheme is going to achieve the desired business objectives. If this is a necessary information gathering exercise, be sure to ask the right questions.
You need to understand the value and benefits to be derived from implementing the Staff Incentive Plan to know how much you are willing to invest to achieve your business goals. Often the value derived from such a scheme may be underestimated, meaning that the reward or incentive is weak and inappropriate. If the reward is worth it, people will strive to achieve the goals set out in the Staff Incentive Plan.
Make sure your business goals are:
Specific
Measurable
Realizable
Realistic
and within a period
Having SMART goals increases the success rate.
2. Get support from senior management
It is advisable to seek the support of senior management before proceeding with any staff incentive scheme. If you have a strong business case with specific financial benefits, it will not be difficult to prove your case.
3. Communicate goals and objectives
The key to the success of any Work Incentives Program is to communicate what you are striving to achieve, why, and what the rewards are for achieving those goals. Team members will need to understand the link between the two or they will not strive to achieve the goal.
Keep the team involved. Inform them of the progress made and remind them of their objectives. This will ensure that they remain focused and motivated.
4. Identify potential challenges
Prevented is worth two. Identifying potential barriers to achieving your desired results before they happen will help you overcome those challenges should they arise, or prevent them altogether. Skills, knowledge, attitude and networks will determine the ability of individuals and the team to achieve the goal.
5.Type of Rewards
Involving team members from the beginning increases the level of ‘buy-in’. Make them own the result. Unfortunately, staff incentive schemes fail miserably if the reward is not valuable to the employee. So how do you know if the rewards are valuable to them? Ask them. Understanding what motivates your team members is an important component of business success.
Not all team members will be motivated by the same things, however there will be common motivators that you can use. Make sure the reward is appropriate, clear, and that you can provide, then deliver it!
6. Identification of the participants
It is important to identify whether you are going to offer individual, team, departmental or company-wide rewards and be aware of the consequences of your choices. For example, in some situations, rewarding people can create a “silo effect,” which restricts knowledge sharing and hurts productivity. Anticipate the kind of culture these decisions will promote and make appropriate amendments if necessary.
7. Measure success and feedback
Have you achieved your desired business goals? If not, why not? Good feedback and analysis will provide information so you can plan to meet those goals in the future. Win/win results are always desirable.
Fostering a culture where you can openly discuss results, good or not so good, is powerful for building a capable team and competitive advantage.
8. Link effort, performance and reward
Emphasize the strong link between effort, performance, and reward. This will promote and encourage the level of performance required to achieve the objective. Rewards should be provided as close to goal achievement as possible. Again, engaging the team and reporting on progress will keep individuals and teams focused and promote a high-performance culture.
9. Review opportunities for improvement
Review progress to date and engage team members in that process. Discussing what improvements need to be made and how to implement them is a powerful way to increase his and your understanding of what is needed to achieve future business goals, building business capability. Then act accordingly!
To remember:
Employee Motivation + Employee Recognition = Business Goals Achieved