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By Mike Timothy Hawk
Employees love getting rewards or incentives. And if what the company offers is something that they truly want or need, employees will certainly work hard so that they can be rewarded with these incentives. Giving employees incentives will definitely have a positive effect on their efficiency and productivity and the overall improvement of a company.
Unfortunately, for organizations, there is nothing easy about starting and implementing an employee incentive scheme. Its creation and planning stage is indeed one of the most difficult and trickiest business owners and decision makers will have to successfully overcome if they want to have a good and effective employee incentive scheme. To have a good employee incentive scheme, business owners will have to avoid the top mistakes below:
Failing to set your target goals for the scheme. The whole process of creating and implementing an incentive scheme will be useless if you are doing this just because everyone else is. Before coming up with the program, you need to establish what aspects of your business you want to improve, whether it is product knowledge, absenteeism rates, customer satisfaction or retention rates, among others. After doing this, you can then establish how the incentive scheme is going to achieve that. Setting your objectives is also crucial so that you will know how much budget you can set for the program. This is because you need to know what those objectives are worth to you in monetary terms so that you know how much you are prepared to spend to generate the desired return on investment.
Not communicating your goals. Your scheme will be useless if your employees do not know what the goals are and the rewards they can get when these goals are achieved. As such, it is important to communicate what you are doing and why is crucial to success. You also have to make sure your employees can relate to both the goals and rewards or they will disengage. Communicating your goals is quite easy to do today anyway. You can promote what you are doing by scheduling meetings with your employees or sending company-wide emails. However, make sure you do this from the moment you launch the incentive scheme; otherwise it will fizzle out or never even get off the ground.
Failing to consult the staff. Lastly, since this type of scheme is all about staff participation, it would work to your advantage to get them involved from the start. Find out what would motivate employees to work harder or please more customers – would it be some cash rewards or additional time off from work? Do not make the mistake of assuming that all your employees will all want the same types of rewards. Keep in mind that incentives have to be relevant to the employee so that they will really work hard for them.
