Employee incentive program: 4 tips to increase your teams' productivity

Do you know the most important trait your company needs day to day? Productivityopens in a new tab! If teams cannot be productive, their results will never be as great as you want! However, productivity does not arrive overnight, which is why you need to implement an employee incentive program right now.

In practice, a program built around smart professional recognition creates a model of operational performance growth, which can have a strongly positive impact on the company’s revenue while using a reward system for employees.

But do you know how and why it is really important to create this kind of incentive program? How do you connect personal career development with business results?

In this article, we show the benefits of using one, in practice, and a list of 4 tips for succeeding when you apply it in your company.

What is an employee incentive program?

An employee incentive program is a system run by the company to recognize and value employees according to what they deliver toward the organization’s results and objectives. In other words, professionals are encouraged in different ways to perform well, and that generates results for the organization.

This recognition model is a method leaders use to motivate and develop their employees, creating an organizational culture that encourages people to reach higher levels of performance and good results.

The logic is simple: when the company achieves good results, it profits. However, in organizations without an employee incentive program, the employee does not share in the gain. That means the chances of people engaging so that the company achieves good results are small.

So a good employee incentive program must be well balanced to deliver consistent results for the company and help employees improve their individual performance. The goal of an employee incentive program is to promote financial health, stimulate innovation and generate enthusiasm in the team.

One of the most common employee incentive programs is Variable Compensation. In it, in addition to fixed pay, the company offers a financial reward that varies according to the employee’s individual performance.

Advantages of implementing an employee incentive program

There are several benefits to running an employee incentive program in your company. And they go far beyond increased productivity.

Check out some of them:

1- The incentive program and team motivation

Creating a creative employee incentive program to deliver rewards in the workplace stimulates and motivates teams to want to stand out and perform at a high level.

In addition, everyone gets one more reason to run after their goals, whether individual or collaborative. In that case, besides increasing engagement, motivation is usually much higher, as long as the goal is achievable and realistic.

Otherwise, the opposite effect, demotivation, can happen. To build a strategic incentive plan, the ideal is to use the logic of SMART goals.

2- Creating a competitive spirit

Implementing an employee incentive program also helps create a distinctive feeling inside the organization: a healthy competitive spirit.

In many companies, that is exactly what is missing day to day. People need to feel this competitive climate that brings energy every day.

“I’ll be the first to hit the goal!” or “I’ll be the best on my team!” are thoughts that spark this desire to compete in a healthy way with other team members.

From there, the company can create Individual Development Plans (IDPs) that will support this spirit of development and growth for professional advancement.

3- Strengthening relationships among employees

It is easy to see that in companies with a well-implemented employee incentive program, there is a closer relationship among employees.

That happens because the support among professionals, so that everyone can follow the right path, and good work is clearer and more objective, since everyone wants to achieve the best results.

Running workplace motivation activities is an excellent way to strengthen relationships among employees.

Watch this video and learn how to run a very fun activity that is easy to organize (in Portuguese):

4 tips to start your employee incentive program now

Did you like learning about the advantages an employee incentive program can bring to the workplace? These are truly valuable benefits.

But that does not mean every program works the same way. A set of strategies to encourage professionals can also fail, for reasons such as:

• Making decisions without time for the team to implement them realistically;
• Trying to cut costs instead of creating a truly attractive program;
• Working with impossible, unreachable metrics;
• Not seeking inspiration from other incentive programs that worked.

To reach the benefits an employee incentive program can generate in your company, we put together a list of 4 tips you need to apply to succeed.

1. Offer benefits with innovative prizes

A salary bonus at the end of the quarter for hitting a goal is a good benefit in an incentive program. But what about going further and thinking of tickets to a famous band’s show coming to town?

While the first will be used to pay a few extra bills, the other will provide a unique experience. Can you see the difference?

Often it is not just the final amount that counts when going after an incentive.

The feeling of earning something different counts for much more. That is why you need to look for different alternatives as benefits to offer in the employee incentive program, which can be:

• Tickets to concerts and shows;
• Incentive trip;
• A day of massage or at a spa;
• Tickets to the best park in town.

Of course, you need to know how to balance the two types of incentive.

2. Deliver the prize right after it is earned

Your employees will value the employee incentive program even more if the prize is delivered right after they reach the proposed goal.

Waiting until the following month, on payday, can lower everyone’s engagement for the next goal.

When you win a competition, the medal has to be handed over at that moment, for example.

The same path is important for the prize set in the incentive program.

3. Go beyond the financial side

In your company, it may be easy to find that there is no greater incentive than honest recognition.

In fact, good praise and, above all, praise from their managers can be ranked among the top performance motivators, surpassing, in some cases, other financial incentives.

So always make sure the prizes you hand out come with great public recognition. And not just for the winner, but for everyone who is making an effort.

Recognizing effort and performance both privately and publicly will make all the difference in sustaining a high level of productivity.

4. Control your data

One of the big problems for companies that implement an employee incentive program is the lack of control to assess whether productivity has improved.

It is essential to have comparison parameters to control the data. Only then can you understand whether there were effective changes in employees’ day-to-day work.

It is not enough to rely on what you can see to perceive change. If you really want a more productive team, it is important to have numbers from before, during and after the program, to find a final result that reflects reality.

In other words, having strategic management softwareopens in a new tab (in Portuguese) is essential for any manager interested in building an employee incentive program.

Next steps

Goal-tracking software can be your best ally at this point, since it helps you understand the level of effort over time to reach a given goal.

Stratwsopens in a new tab (in Portuguese) is a robust, easy-to-use corporate performance management software. Among its many modules, one deals specifically with individual performance management, which lets you implement visual management and meritocracy, among other HR processes.