Motivating your teams can feel like a daunting task. You want your teams to work hard, be productive and perform their roles to a high standard, which after all is what you pay them for!
But salary alone isn’t usually enough to motivate your people to high performance and productivity but having the right reward and recognition programs in place can, and it can also improve your company culture, employee loyalty and encourage positive behaviour in your workplace – all of which lead to better productivity.
Incentives can be a key part of a reward and recognition program, and better still they can often be simple and low cost to implement meaning you can have a varied approach which should go some way to motivating a diverse team.
Types of Incentive
Compensation Incentives: These are your fairly standard monetary incentives and are usually linked to job performance or seniority within the company. They can be used in career planning to incentivise an employee to progress to promotion and the next salary step.
Recognition Incentives: Seen as a simple and budget-friendly way to incentivise your teams – but if your company culture isn’t conductive to this, it can take a long time and a lot of effort to instil these behaviours and for them not to feel forced. Using a recognition platform can help as it gives employees and managers a structured tool to give recognition.
Reward Incentives: Traditional, target or sales-based bonuses fit into this category and the way these are structured is key to their success within your business. Ideally, reward initiatives should reward both exhibiting the types of positive behaviours you want in your organisation (such as teamwork) along with meeting the actual target. This also enables these types of incentives to be relevant to a wider range of roles, and not just sales-focussed roles. Reward incentives can be used as a way to boost productivity for a short, fixed period, even set up as a competition, for instance rewarding the team that makes the most sales in a fixed period with a monetary award or alternative like extra days holiday.
Appreciation Incentives: You might call these perks – they’re nice-to-haves which do require budget and often promote unity and team building. Ideally, you would spread these across the year, rather than a one-off event like a Christmas party.
Examples of incentives
You likely already have some incentives in place in your business, even if you don’t think of them as such. We recommend taking a multifaceted approach to take into account different groups within your business and also individual differences – where one incentive might be particularly motivating for some individuals, others might find more value in another.
However, the key to using incentives (as with many initiatives) is culture. If you can foster a high performance, positive and appreciative culture within your organisation then you will reap the rewards.
The HROverload team can review your incentives and help you to implement a joined-up strategy to improve performance and productivity in your workplace. Get in touch hello@hroverload.co.uk.