posted in BEST PRACTICES & BUSINESS PERFORMANCE & EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT & EMPLOYEE REWARDS
Finding the link between staff rewards and benefits that businesses with employee incentive programs enjoy isn’t nearly as difficult as most managers imagine.
In fact, that link is often staring you right in the face, but it will require some effort to understand.
You see, the benefits that businesses gain from running staff rewards can only manifest in the right conditions.
As a manager, your job is to create an environment with the right conditions for success. This can be as simple as making yourself more readily available to answer any questions your staff may have, or giving your team the opportunity to come up with creative solutions to problems your business faces. If you’re secretly asking yourself whether an employee reward program can really deliver results, the answers is: YES!
What most managers should know but don’t
Running a high-performance team is just as challenging as running a poorly-performing team. Contrary to the positive stress of striving towards achievement in a high-performance team, managers of weaker teams find themselves spending the same amount of energy (or more) focusing on people problems instead.
So, how do you help your team make the leap to the upper echelons of high-performance with the help of staff rewards? Good question. To answer it, you’ll need understand these three important concepts:
That right motivators and staff rewards drive productivity
How heightened focus is a by-product of the right motivators and rewards
How positive morale becomes contagious
Motivation and staff rewards drive productivity
Everything that we do is driven by motivation. In the workplace, sometimes these motivating factors are hard to see or appear insufficient to jolt people into action. Instead, the urgency and drive to get stuff done gets lost in the humdrum of the weeks and months that follow.
While it can be hard to keep your team motivated, especially in trying times, it’s important to not lose sight of the link between productivity and motivation.
In his Forbes’ article, “The 3 Forces That Drive Improved Productivity,” Jack Zenger, CEO of Zenger/Folkman, a strength-based leadership development firm out of Utah, North America, shares that they’ve uncovered three contributing forces that drive productivity improvements in businesses.
According to Zenger, these forces are:
An individual’s internal motivation and drive which can be influenced by an organisation’s demands or be self-imposed
A team’s performance norms which are influenced by their leader
The organisational culture of the business
Motivation and reward
It’s long been understood that one’s internal motivation is a key driver and that organisations can influence employee behaviour, yet the challenge that most businesses have is learning how to motivate employees to act. This is where the right rewards can be instrumental.
Not all employees are wired the same way. Some have families and their immediate goal is to provide for and constantly enhance their family’s quality of life; others may be younger and see travel as an integral part of their life. Finding what motivates your employees, both in and outside of work will help you determine which rewards they value most. This is one of the reasons why we developed TuYu mobile rewards. We found that mobile cash paid directly (and instantly) to an employee for achieving an important milestone carried more weight than the traditional incentives, such as TVs or washing machines. With TuYu, employees can choose where to spend their cash rewards at over 70,000 till lanes across SA.
The link between rewards and clarity
When you understand what motivates your employees and link rewards to their motivators, you then need to create a set of clear rules for the attainment of these rewards.
Rules eliminate all ambiguity and prove to staff that achievement is not mystical but based on a simple formula that can be applied with a little effort.
Heightened focus
When motivating factors and staff rewards are in place, employees start to develop a renewed sense of focus and begin to work diligently towards their goals, which are now clearer than ever before. This is due to there being a clear line of sight.
Line of sight is defined as an employee’s ability to see how specific actions they perform produce specific results. Line of sight is a serious challenge for many businesses and can cripple any fledging business.
On the other hand, when line of sight is established along with the right rewards and motivators, magic begins to happen. Challenges no longer become roadblocks, but instead become hurdles that are easily traversed, and employees become more creative problem solvers.
Positive morale becomes contagious
Line of sight doesn’t only lead to heightened focus for your team. It also silently, but rapidly creates a positive environment where positive morale begins to thrive, as more people can see how their efforts are linked to organisational goals. When staff begin to receive rewards, they are further motivated to improve their productivity. They begin to see that the universe wants them to succeed and is continuously providing opportunities for them to do so.
Those on the sidelines begin to see that what was previously thought to be a secret regarding performance and achievement in the workplace is within reach. Achievement met by reward bolsters their confidence and their positive approach to accomplishing what is in line with their goals. This begins to rub off on others who may seem a little less convinced. Because interdependence is the nature of life and work, interaction with those striving for achievement causes others to get more involved to reach their own personal goals and contribute to something meaningful.
Conclusion
Peak performing teams are created when managers uncover what motivates their team members and match those motivators with the right staff rewards. The results are unique to each business, but the three major benefits businesses with properly designed employee incentive programs enjoy are enhanced productivity, refined focus on organisational goals, and more positive environment that creates more success.