Katie Edwards — February 27, 2018 — February 27, 2018
When people hear incentive promotions, they think sales. Typically, they don’t think HR initiatives. However, these days almost anything can work to keep employees engaged with their work. If you add a bit of competition, your employees will naturally get more involved. After all, a healthy level of competition and fun can really impact a culture for the better. As long as everyone remembers that work comes first, incentive programs are a great way to engage your employees!
Types of Promotions
The types of promotions you can run very depending on your company and employees. Are you a healthcare organization or a hotel chain? Do you have employees who interact with each other across departments, or do you have strict silos of communication?
While not every promotion type would work for every company, the following ideas could help you create promotions that will work for your company.
For example, you could run a wellness promotion where you encourage your employees to stay healthy and make positive lifestyle choices.
Another example would be to track the recognition messages sent in a given time period and reward the person who sends the most recognition messages or reward the person who receives the most recognition messages (or both!). These are simple promotions that encourage frequent interaction with the program.
You’re not limited to just these types of promotions. Maybe you have a department you want to meet a certain goal? Maybe there is a customer service level standard you want to surpass? The type of promotion will vary depending on what is important to you and your company.
Reward Payout Options
There is a difference between the type of promotion and how your users get their reward. There are quite a few ways you can payout rewards. This is where the incentives aspect gets fun by using gamification.
You could create a lottery-based promotion, for example. If your employees meet a certain parameter, they get a lottery ticket. At the end of the month or quarter, you can do a drawing and the winner gets a prize.
A second example would be a Spin-to-Win game. For every 5 recognition messages, you receive/send, you get one spin on the wheel of rewards. It adds a bit of luck and makes it fun for your employees.
Within the actual rewards, you can have anything from a monetary gift to a parking spot, to an extra day of vacation, or anything else. Take a look at what is important to your employees and make it something they actually want. (After all, who wants to win a toaster?)
Through incentive rewards, you get to play around and add a bit of meat to the bare bones of recognition.
Keep Employees Engaged
You could have an exciting incentive promotion, but if your communication technique is off, you will see minimal results. Keep your employees informed when a program goes live, and send reminders throughout the life of the promotion. Participants often get excited in the beginning and drop off as other things come to the forefront of their attention. Email notifications and in-person reminders are a great way to keep the initiative top of mind.
Update content within the program frequently. In WorkStride’s recognition solution, for example, admins can adjust the Highlight Slider on the homepage. By keeping that slider fresh and relevant, your users will get important information quickly.
It’s All About the Employee Experience
Adding incentives and games to recognition makes sense, but let’s not forget exactly why it is a good idea in the first place! It’s not to get employees to interact with a program, it’s not to get people to win more money. It’s to increase the overall experience your employees have while working for your company! Games and promotions are simply a method in which you can exemplify and improve your company culture. If you implement incentives, games, or any other kind of activity, but don’t truly understand why it’s important, you’re going to miss the mark.
Make sure you are focused on the employee and how they interact with their work environment. You might think that incentives will bring your employees out of a rut, but unless you are making multiple efforts to improve culture and morale, you will get minimal success. (After all, if a miserable employee is asked to send a false message to their coworker, it won’t actually increase morale, even if there is a monetary reward.) On the other hand, frequent, genuine messages of praise and thankfulness are proven to drastically increase employee culture.
Interested in how WorkStride can help your company improve your company culture? Book a demo today!
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