Invigorate your company culture – why incentives for employees are the key to your company’s success

When it comes to employees, rewards and incentives in the workplace have benefits for both employees and employers. When recognising employees for their performance and productivity, it can improve morale, job satisfaction and motivation to support organisations in achieving their aims. Through workplace rewards and incentives for employees, employers and staff alike can enjoy a positive working environment and can go a long way in boosting productivity.

Just as an incentive can motivate you, offering your teams rewards can encourage them to work hard and grow, and more importantly, feel appreciated and recognised for their good work, and incentives are one way to show them that.

So, do incentives really work? What can they actually do for a business? And why should you offer our employees incentives to do their job? Isn’t their salary enough?

Well, to answer these questions, you need to understand why an incentive programme might be good for your business, in other words, what do you want to achieve by implementing an employee incentive? Here we take a look at five of the most common outcomes organisations will be trying to achieve with incentives, and why it matters.

1. Employee Incentives increase productivity

Incentives promote productivity in several ways. The obvious solution is to incentivise staff to deliver more sales, with rewards for hitting their targets and a distinct lack of rewards for failing to get there, but an incentive scheme should be a much more than a “carrot and stick” tick-box exercise.

Instead, incentives can – and should be used to encourage staff to educate themselves about new products or services, build long-standing relationships with customers, demonstrate brand values, or develop new skills that will make it easier for them to perform in their role. This may well have the knock-on effect of increasing sales in many cases, but it’ll also benefit the business in a much more holistic way.

By thinking about what your organisation needs, and aligning the scheme to those goals and vision, you can improve employees’ ability to do their jobs well, increasing productivity.

2. Help retain your ‘star’ employees & attract new talent

Your best company assets are intangible: knowledge, experience and talent. Organisations need all three of these elements in order to be successful, and incentives can help achieve this in a world where employees are increasingly likely to have one eye on the job listings.

Offering employee incentives shows each member of your workforce that they are valued, that they have a part to play in making sure that the organisation is a success. And, ultimately, making employees feel valued is the key to employee loyalty. By doing so, you can give employees a sense of purpose, focusing their energies and recognising their achievements or performance levels.

3. Influence positive behaviour

Incentives direct people towards a goal, and influence their behaviour in order to achieve that goal. Depending on the results you need, schemes can be designed to help sales employees develop deep product knowledge, to promote teamwork and collaboration, or to communicate brand values and encourage employees to live up to them.

4. Increase company morale and positive culture

Staff incentive programmes improve employee morale in a number of ways. A properly set-up incentive scheme gives employees a reason to believe in the company they work for, and that they are part of something bigger.

It also shows employees that you care – especially when the rewards are tailored towards people’s individual wants and needs. They can improve employee happiness and create a sense of fun by utilising tools such as gamification, all of which contribute to increasing company morale.

5.Happy Staff – increase your sales

It’s official; happiness affects how well your staff perform at work. If your staff merely clock in and out, and have no reason to perform, they’ll soon lose motivation and do the bare minimum. But if they’re counting down to a day out at a posh Spa or Premier League football match for hitting their sales targets, they’ll go above and beyond the call of duty.

A robust incentives programme can boost employee engagement levels and harness a complete wellness strategy within your business. It can showcase to your employees that you genuinely care about their wellbeing and can support in retaining talent. Happy and satisfied employees are more likely to work more efficiently, be more productive and take fewer sick days.

Interested? Please do get in touch now for a friendly chat to discuss implementing employee incentives within your workplace.