Are your rewards motivating?

We might all want motivated staff teams and we may even put comprehensive reward schemes in place but it is so easy to get it wrong. The Rank Group found this to their cost when employees ended up paying for ‘rewards’ they didn’t know they had taken. We have seen some amazingly clumsy reward systems. Employees who come up with bright ideas that save companies thousands of pounds, get a £15 high street voucher; young streetwise employees are given ‘rewards’ suitable for their maiden aunts and this can leave staff with the feeling that their additional efforts are being trivialised.

How can you get a reward system right? If you can match the reward with the effort expended and make the system clear and fair up front and you will be heading in the right direction. Why not include rewards in your employee survey activity, asking staff what they would value and to rank the items. Then you can then let them chose for themselves matching their achievements to graded rewards. As ever, the only way to get this right is to involve the people you are trying to motivate. More here