5 ways to make your employee recognition program easier to manage

Your workforce is the heart of your business, but if they are not properly motivated to be sales and service minded, you could be losing opportunities and potential revenue.

One way organizations are motivating their staff is to create rewards and recognition programs. It may seem that awarding top performers should be a no-brainer but many still do not, or if they do their rewards and recognition program remains, primarily, a manual process. Companies without a solution are using email and spreadsheets to manage these services, but identifying top performing employees, and keeping them motivated to do their best work, is a big job, and can quickly encumber be abandoned by those running them if not thought through.

So, how do we build a better reward campaign and make the entire program easier to run?

Ask yourself why!

There are endless resources to suggest that an engaged workforce is a more productive workforce, but knowing the precise business objectives you are trying to achieve is something of a different story.Since every industry has its own policies and procedures, and each company is as unique as the people in them, there is no one-size-fits-all for defining business objectives.

Starting with the question why, will help you to design a process that supports your outcomes.

• Are you looking to raise sales volume throughout your organization?
• Would you like to increase your overall company morale?
• Do you want to raise the productivity of your workforce?
• Have you considered a program to promote your company culture?
• Do your employee engagement levels need work?
• Did you say yes to all the above?
• Setting your performance targets ahead of the game will take the guess-work out of rewarding staff for their accomplishments.

Ask yourself who?

Once you know the benchmarks you need your workforce to strive for, you need to find a reward that can motivate them. Never underestimate the power a genuine “Thank You” can have on morale, but it is also important to note its delivery.

Awarding your staff with rewards is a good way to acknowledge the effort your employees have put into achieving the goals you’ve set for your organization. When determining what you will offer as the incentive, you can be creative, thinking outside of the box, but it’s best to keep employee values top of mind.

‍As the millennial generation overtakes their boomer parents in the workforce, business owners need to realize that these new generation workers have been known to value incentives over salary.

Rewards should be something that matters to the employees earning them; time off of work, preferred parking, travel bonuses, and gifts are amongst the popular choices. But we’ve also heard of handwritten notes, new equipment for the office, and charitable contributions made on an employee’s behalf, as well as any form of public recognition to be highly motivating.

Find a solution that works!

Even the best thought-out strategies can be tedious to manage without a proper solution behind them. Investing in a program that is easy to use, quick to set up, and is customizable is a personal decision, but a product like Qarrot is a flexible employee recognition platform designed to be used as an engagement and motivation tool.

The dashboards are easy to use, and alleviate administrative effort by centralizing recognition in one place, eliminating email clutter, automating most processes, and removing time-consuming manual processes, resulting in less friction when earning and cashing in on rewards.

Qarrot is more than a rewards system, it operates a SaaS-based employee motivation and engagement platform for all industries. Its platform enables users to recognize employee accomplishments, launch goal-based campaigns and to celebrate milestones like birthdays and work anniversaries.

Get buy-in from management!

Truthfully, once you’ve implemented a system that removes the manual processes, and offers real-time reporting tools to help set and meet business objectives, it’s pretty easy to get managers to use it. If you are still using a legacy system, coming up with creative ways to get leaders to engage with your employees is key to motivating them.

‍Helping employees to understand the impact their performance has on the organization’s goals is essential to helping your workforce see the value they bring to the company. By providing clear expectations of behavior, performance and outcomes you can have managers communicate these expectations to employees. This way there is a clear connection between what managers say are important attributes and what behavior is actually rewarded

Simplify reporting!

A good solution will provide targeted reporting for you. Setting and meeting goals to establish a link between effort and value is crucial to determining a real ROI for the program. Stakeholders will require these reports regularly and your system should take the guess-work out of providing them.

Don’t forget to measure the impact on both employees and the company. Everything from revenue, absenteeism, productivity, engagement levels, and retention can be affected by a well-executed rewards program.

‍Understanding what information is important to which stakeholders will help make reporting easier too. The sales department may want your recognition and performance reports to identify employees deserving of a promotion, for example, where your finance department may want the overall expense report.

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Request A Demo

An employee recognition program, like Qarrot, can help you to leverage your workforce to increase sales, customer service and overall employee satisfaction. Keeping it simple, but useful, with your workforce’s values in mind will not only help you get more out of your rewards program but make it easier for you to manage overall.

‍Request your free demo of Qarrot today!