One of my favorite HR books is 1001 Ways To Reward Employees. It goes through 1001 ways that you can recognize your team starting from ideas that cost no money to others that start getting more expensive.
One thing I’ve found with my team is the actions that you reward get repeated so you want to make sure you’re rewarding the right thing!
I have two high school interns, for example, who work with many of my customers. What I started doing a few months ago was putting a line at the bottom of all the emails that they send out that reads:
“How am I doing? If you’ve had a good or bad experience working with me please tell Andrew at (email).”
Every time they do a good enough job for one of my customers to write in, I print off the customer email, make a small announcement in the office and reward the intern $10 for the job well done.
For a high school student, it’s a nice reward and it can quickly add up as they continue to do a good job! Yes, I’m out of pocket a little bit of money but how much is customer satisfaction worth? The interns now have an incentive to provide better service because they know they will get rewarded for doing so.
Every quarter I also give all my staff members different appreciation gifts – some get Amazon gift certificates because they are big book readers, others get ebay gift certificates because they are constantly bidding on different items, and others get gifts based on what they’ve been talking about in the office (ie. movie passes for one team member who has been working very hard and needs a break!).
These gifts are usually pretty small in monetary value ($20-$50) but the recognition helps motivate them to continue to perform and keeps the morale high in the office.
The quarterly gifts have worked out well as a general “Thank you for your loyalty” but the performance based ones are having an even greater impact! My next challenge is figuring out how to implement a performance based reward system for technical and editorial staff who are not directly tied to customers or revenue. The behavior I reward will get repeated over and over again so I want to make sure I’m picking the right behavior!
If you haven’t already established a rewards program you should try it out! It can be as simple as someone getting a trophy on their desk until someone else earns the right to have it or giving people hand written, thoughtful notes. You can promise to do something out of character if you reach a certain goal and money, of course, is also a great incentive but remember it doesn’t have to be much to get them going.
Have you tried any kind of performance based incentive programs with your team members?
