Are the employee rewards and recognition you offer the right ones to make them feel appreciated and valued? Or, do you need a rethink?
As you map out your post-Covid path to recovery, a happy, motivated workforce will be critical to achieving your long-term business goals. You probably already know solid rewards and recognition plan will help you keep your best talent to do this. It’s backed up in research. According to a recent study by Smarp, 71% of executives now believe that employee engagement is vital to their success.
We thought it would be helpful to put together a quick checklist to help you re-evaluate your current plan – if you have one – or create a fresh programme for the coming year. Crafting a plan needn’t be complex or expensive and we hope you find this useful. Let’s get started.
#1 What do you want to achieve?
Business priorities for 2021 have been changed by the pandemic. The types of behaviour that used to be rewarded like hitting performance or sales targets are being replaced by different measures of what a positive contribution to the business looks like.
- Have your goals changed – if they have – what are your new long-term goals?
- How can you foster and change behaviour to achieve your goals?
- What types of positive behaviours do you want to encourage employees to repeat?
#2 How has your employee experience changed?
There have been seismic shifts in the way we work over the past year and your employees’ experience, expectations and priorities have changed. Motivating a remote/hybrid workforce is different to being in the office full time.
- What do employees think about your current plan?
- What types of rewards would they value?
#3 Building the rewards team
For your rewards and recognition programme to work it will need to be managed effectively.
- Who will design and manage your programme?
- Should you invite an employee to join the team to act as an advocate both for their peers and for the programme?
#4 Does the plan reflect your core values?
Revisit what your business stands for and how your values should be tied into employee rewards.
- Do you need to revisit your core values?
- What should you call your programme – how does this reflect your values?
#5 What types of rewards should you offer?
Making your plan inclusive is essential for everyone to feel valued for the contribution they make. You will need to consider a diverse range of rewards that appeal to your team, wherever and however they work.
- What types of structured rewards like ’employee of the week’ should you continue to offer?
- Is peer-to-peer recognition important?
- Will digital rewards make it easy to reward your remote team?
- How can you weave appreciation into your work culture?
- How will you celebrate life events?
Remember, sometimes saying thank you or praising an employee is all it takes.
#6 Reward frequency
You don’t want your people who work from home, or infrequently in your workplace, to become disengaged because they feel like they are out of sight, out of mind.
- How often should you reward your team?
- Why wait until the end of the month or year – should you be instantly rewarding team members who are doing good things?
#7 Measuring employee engagement
Creating an empowering workplace culture is vital. An employee net promoter score survey is good for this. Using a scale-out of 1 to 10 is a simple and cost-effective way to measure and keep track of how engaged your employees are.
What else?
What will it cost? Rewards don’t need to cost the earth however, it’s important to have a cost estimation to plan. How will you manage your programme? An employee benefits platform with in-built rewards and recognition functionality will be a big help in making sure everyone can participate. We are here if you need our help