Employee incentives can often turn a mediocre business into a revenue powerhouse when it comes to the bottom line. In fact, there are many ways to boost employee efficiency using creative bonuses to rally the troops. Here are a few novel incentive ideas for businesses of all sizes that have proven their worth over the past few years.
Award Prizes That Provide an Experience
While a cash prize for meeting certain performance criteria is always welcome, many employees prefer vacation experiences. You could offer a spa package or a weekend outdoor adventure in lieu of money. Zipline excursions and skydiving outfits can be found throughout the country in short order. What’s more, these experiences can be surprisingly cheap.
Donate to a Charity of Their Choice
Nowadays, socially conscious Millennial employees place an emphasis on donating to various charitable causes. Offering to donate to the charity of their choosing should they meet certain performance benchmarks is a terrific motivator for some. Better yet, donating to charity is a great way to promote your business brand.
Hand Out Scratch-Off Lottery Tickets
Even if you’re not a gambler, rolling the dice once in a while is just good, clean fun. Offering an assortment of scratch-off lottery tickets to the most productive employee every week can yield surprising results. The possibility of winning something for nothing is an exciting proposition that’s hard to turn down.
Cater a Weekly Theme Breakfast
Few things in life light a fire under employees like a fantastic meal served up by professional food artisans. Mix things up by picking a particular ethnic cuisine to focus on like Mexican or French. Wednesday is an optimal time to cater to a company breakfast if improving morale is your goal.
Hand Out Netflix Gift Cards or Other Gift Cards
Believe it or not, there’s a solid chunk of the American public that hasn’t sprung for Netflix at this point in time. A Netflix Gift Card is always appreciated by those who haven’t found a reason to justify the expense. Netflix Gift Cards are fairly cheap and always a welcome surprise.
For consistent performers in your team, you can consider signing them up for Amazon Prime or giving out other coupons or gift cards.
Pay Employees to Take a Nap
Few things in life are more satisfying than sleeping on the job. Many employees will spring for a paid nap rather than a cash prize in exchange for top-notch work. It’s been proven that napping during the day can improve productivity for certain individuals that work for hourly rates or commissions.
Offer Flexible Healthcare Options
For the average American, healthcare costs represent a significant portion of the monthly household budget. Services like Benefitfocus and Wageworks allow employees to pick and choose healthcare benefits that really make a difference.
Check out a Benefitfocus review or a Wageworks review to see what those platforms can bring to the table.
Dole Out High-End Electronics
In today’s highly wireless age, having great electronics on your person at all times is crucial. If you reward workers with high-end electronics, that’ll go a long way towards boosting productivity.
A brand-new iPhone is pretty cheap when you compare its cost to the revenue that a motivated employee can deliver over time.
Kick In Time-Saving Family Perks
There’s a good chance that there’s a parent in any given crew regardless of the specific industry in which you ply your trade. Those parents enjoy perks like free childcare in the form of supervision agents. Hiring an on-site “nanny” that can supervise tots is a perk that parents always love.
Dole Out a Fitness-Related Bonus
In an increasingly sedentary society, more people than ever are going out of their way to burn calories off the clock. Awarding top employees with memberships to fitness clubs is a sure-fire way to ramp up productivity. Look for the best gyms around and team up with them to give workers incentive bonuses.
How to Monitor Your Incentives
An incentive must deliver reliable results to be effective. Here are a few sure-fire ways to evaluate an incentive’s impact.
Use Software to Gauge Return on Investment
In a data-driven world, it makes sense to use software to monitor employee productivity throughout any given month. Tracking productivity gains during any given period is a must if you want to optimize an incentive program.
FortUse an incentive compensation management software to analyze productivity data and measure the success of the employee rewards program.
Solicit Regular Feedback From Employees
There’s no better way to determine whether or not an incentive is working than by polling your workers for commentary.
The best way to do this is by making the feedback completely anonymous. Anonymous employee feedback regarding incentive programs ensures that the information you get is totally unbiased and honest.
Look at Customer Satisfaction Ratings
At the end of the day, the customer is always right. As such, the satisfaction ratings of clients determine how effective your employees are at any given moment.
Look at customer reviews when assessing the effectiveness of an incentive program to determine whether or not said program is truly delivering.
The Long and Short of It
For an incentive to work, it has to be properly tailored to a specific group. Dialing in the right incentive mix for a group isn’t easy. If you can find the right assortment of incentives for your crew, you can easily supercharge productivity in short order and maximize ROI.