This is a guest post by Xoxoday.
The key to an engaged workforce is recognizing employees for their contributions and valuing them with personalized rewards.
An engaged workforce would put more energy into their work and contribute to an increase in your profitability by up to 21%. A successful reward program can also significantly reduce your turnover.
To set yourself up for a successful employee rewards program, here are some best practices when it comes to using rewards to motivate employees:
Practice #1: Set clear objectives and expectations for your gifting program
Lack of clear goals is one of the main reasons most reward programs fail. By setting expectations before implementing your program, you can track progress and course-correct when things don’t go your way.
Your gifting program can either be based on metrics recommended by management— such as attrition and churn—or could be employee-oriented such as NPS scores. It is totally up to you to choose the right metrics to measure the success of your initiatives.
Ensure you have a clear understanding of the types of behavioral changes you expect from your employees. The more clearly you outline the behaviors you want to see, the more likely your employees will reach those goals. Circulate guides, videos, and other collateral to help your employees understand how your gifting program works and how they can take advantage of it.
Practice #2: Gather feedback
As an HR, listening to the pulse of your employees is the key to running an effective reward program. Announce the initiative and record their responses to various aspects of your program.
Incorporate the feedback in regular intervals to ensure your rewards program works seamlessly and becomes more effective over some time. Come up with creative reward ideas to engage your workforce and define the KPIs for these “experiments.”
Practice #3: Allocate budgets
A common reason companies fail to achieve their goals when it comes to rewards is that they gift employees on an ad-hoc basis. While expensive gifts such as a trip to Paris or Rome might motivate staff in the short term, they are not sustainable and might not help you reach your goals.
According to Forbes, building a rich reward and recognition program can reduce turnover by up to 31%. To ensure the success of a rewards program, HR leaders should allocate quarterly budgets and explain the significance of these programs in their organization’s bottom line.
Dealing with multiple vendors can be taxing on your staff. Logistics also plays a vital role in whether a gifting initiative is successful. HR leaders and organizations should look for ways to automate rewarding employees and manually procuring rewards while focusing on the bigger picture.
Practice #4: Integrate it with your existing HRMS tools
Fragmentation of employee data can be detrimental to calculating ROI and analytics for your incentive programs. As an HR leader or an administrator, it is essential to use a rewards program that seamlessly integrates with your existing HRMS solution like Zoho People.
The main advantage of integrating your rewards program with your HRMS system is that you could handle HR processes and employee rewards in a single place. Also, it would help employees redeem rewards in a system that they are already familiar with.
Practice #5: Measure ROI and analytics
To measure the success of your initiatives, you can look at how the metrics have improved after you implement your incentive program. Contrary to popular belief, gifting initiatives are not a “cost-sink” and can provide excellent returns with good execution.
Crucial metrics like “Net Promoter Scores” let you understand employee morale and help you track the pulse on the ground. Data from your reward initiatives can also be used to make business decisions across departments. By understanding, if the behavior is isolated or generic, you can take corrective actions and implement learnings across the company.
With an effective digitized gifting solution, not only can you quickly see sent, received, or redeemed reports, but you can track overall campaign performance.
Learn how you can take advantage of Xoxoday Plum Rewards from Zoho People if you would like to implement these best practices.
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