What You Need to Know to Build the Best Total Rewards Program

Each organization will have unique goals and objectives they strive towards to create the best work environment for their employees and drive the most profits!   If you are tasked with motivating and engaging your employees to meet these business goals and objectives, you’re going to want a recognition and rewards program that is custom built specifically to motivate and engage your employees to achieve these unique goals and create an engaging workplace and exceptional customer experiences.

Keeping this in mind, we have gathered up some of our best tips for you to consider when building a total rewards program for your organization.

1. Set Expectations

You never want to pollute the winner’s circle with losers.  What I mean by this is, it’s important to distinguish the behaviours and actions that garner recognition within your organization, and not water down your recognition.  This will reinforce those positive behaviours that contribute to reaching your unique goals and objectives and will drive and motivate employees to continuously improve their performance.  When you set great expectations for your employees, they will feel challenged, motivated and strive to do their best.

2. Motivate Your People with What They Want

It’s important to have a wide variety of rewards to recognize your employees with.   When it comes to recognition, one size does not fit all.  Rewards that motivate one person, will be different than those that motivate another.   Some employees might want to save their points for bigger ticket items, while others might want to redeem immediately for gift cards, music downloads and in the moment rewards.  For example, GES’s virtually unlimited reward options include awards, event tickets, gift cards, lifestyle products, music, travel, wellness products and charitable donations.  We recently blogged about our most redeemed rewards – check out The Goodies Your Employees Want here.

3. Make it Personalized

Along with having a wide variety of reward options like mentioned above, you also want to personalize your recognition for each employee.  We often underestimate the value of a personalized thank you, or personalized recognition of an employee in front of their peers.  Many employees reported that they had not been personally acknowledged for their contribution by their direct manager or peers.  It’s a simple concept that can make a huge difference for your work culture.

4. Utilize Both Monetary and Non-Monetary Recognition

Hand in hand with having vast reward choice and personalized recognition, you want to utilize a combination of both monetary and non-monetary recognition to reward your employees.  When you build a culture of recognition, you should be practicing it with your employees at every touch point.  Not every behaviour might garner a monetary reward, but surely if you see a positive behaviour occurring, as a leader, it is your job to recognize that person in the moment.  There is much to be said about the power of positive recognition in the workplace, which should include both a formal monetary/points based reward program and verbal/written recognition from their leaders. Read more about the Power of Appreciation here.

5. Encourage Peer-to-Peer Recognition

If you truly want to create a deep recognition culture in your organization, your leaders should also encourage their employees to recognize each other, day to day and moment to moment.  You can incorporate peer-to-peer recognition into your formal recognition program by allowing peers to recognize each other with smaller monetary values throughout the year, or even just encouraging them to acknowledge each other on your internal communications boards.  For example, GES’s total rewards programs incorporates a private social media feed where employees can congratulate each other on milestones, a job well done, etc. This really reinforces that your company places a high value on recognizing the positive behaviours of your employees.

6. Incorporate a Learn and Earn Environment

Learning is consistently proven to be one of the key drivers of employee engagement.  Your employees want to feel like they are continuously growing and achieving higher levels of performance.  You can encourage this growth and development (which leads to better service internally and externally), by creating a learn and earn environment, whereby your employees are rewarded with points in your recognition program for completing learning and development programs.  For example, GES’s eLearning and Recognition programs synch seamlessly, and you can recognize and reward your employees for their learning achievements.  Here are some more good tips on how you can use learning and development to engage and motivate your employees.

Learn more about how GES’s Global Total Rewards Solutions help you create a customized program that is culturally relevant (delivered globally), personalized, completely supported by our staff (less admin headaches for your team), and completely mobile friendly (for in time recognition).  If you’d like to hear more about how we can help you reach your recognition goals in 2018, get in touch at jenn@globalengagementsolutions.com or book a 15-minute call in my calendar here