Improving employee incentive programmes can boost organisational performance by 44%. Here’s how to design an effective employee incentive scheme that motivates all employees and a scheme specifically for sales staff.

How to incentivise your employees

When you create an employee motivation strategy, it should be based on a clear understanding of employee needs and an element of responsiveness that will help you to improve your organisational culture.

Strategy is not everything though – you will also need to choose from a suite of tactical measures that will help you work out how to incentivise employees and make your strategy stick. This means creating an employee incentive programme that will help you to:

• Attract talent
• Retain talent
• Improve employee motivation
• Create positive organisational culture

In the current climate what employers offer to achieve these goals is evolving, driven by a range of factors that include the cost-of-living crisis, carbon net zero targets and the need to increase employee motivation to drive productivity.

Here’s a rundown of some of the best and most popular ways to incentivise employees:

Employee savings and discount schemes

With the cost of living biting hard and many employers unable to offer significant pay rises – organisations are choosing to incentivise employees with schemes that offer discounts at hundreds of retailers and hospitality outlets. While such schemes are no substitute for a pay rise – they do demonstrate that employers and doing what they can and have their employees’ best interests at heart.

Employee recognition

To drive employee motivation, employers provide recognition and reward platforms that empower managers and colleagues to provide thanks for good work and key career milestones. The rewards that employers provide via these schemes range from financial rewards to gifts – must often in the form of eGift cards that employees can redeem at their own convenience.

Wellbeing incentives

To tackle mental and physical issues and boost productivity, employers are also increasingly incentivising employees providing wellbeing benefits that include gym memberships, health screenings, dental insurance, and the ability to buy and sell annual leave.

Green incentives

Driven by the need to meet carbon net zero targets – some employers are also increasingly offering green incentives that benefit both the organisation and the employee. Examples of such benefits include Cycle to Work schemes, deals on electric vehicle leases and EV chargers and discounts on public transport for travel to work.

When you are thinking about how to incentivise employees, the most important thing to bear in mind is that any measures you put in place are your opportunity to reinforce company values, culture and behaviours in a way that will ultimately drive motivation and productivity. 

How to incentivise sales staff

To summarise, employers that want to motivate employees need to create comprehensive strategies that cover a wide range of factors - from management training to wellbeing support and better opportunities for progression. But the mix also needs to include simple and effective incentive schemes that encourage employees to achieve specific targets.

Nowhere is this truer than in the field of sales. Figures from the Incentive Research Foundation show that 90% of top-performing companies use incentive programs to reward sales teams. However, there is also clear evidence that well thought-out incentive schemes motivate all kinds of employees and can increase overall business performance by as much as 44%.

Too many organisations currently feel their incentive schemes don’t work as they intended. In the worst cases, cumbersome processes and mechanisms for giving and accessing rewards leave employees feeling unintentionally frustrated rather than valued.

With this in mind – here are 7 simple tips for designing a scheme that will help you incentivise employees effectively and achieve your business goals:

7 steps to designing an effective inventive scheme:

 1. Make incentives and rewards distinct

Make sure any financial incentives you provide are visible. For example, if you provide rewards through regular salary payments, they will likely get lost in day-to-day spending. Instead provide distinct rewards through separate channels like prepaid cards or eCodes that recipients can swap for gift cards. Employees are much more likely to value such payments and use them for treats they will remember – in turn, this will incentivise them to perform to their best again in the future.

2. Reflect people’s experience as online consumers

Go digital and ensure employees can access the incentives you provide easily online or through an app. As online consumers and users of social media, employees want and expect the same experience from their interactions with their employer. Digital reward systems also provide choice: employees can choose from a range of rewards that they can tailor to their needs and will value more highly.

3. Aim for immediacy

When you deploy an online recognition and reward system, you can also empower management teams to issues rewards ‘in the moment.’ One of the biggest problems with many older incentive schemes is the length of time it takes between earning and receiving reward. Reward needs to be immediate to encourage repeat behaviour.

4. Recognise the small acts as well as bigger achievements

Recognise and incentivise the ‘big’ achievements, such as reaching a sales target, but also reward the smaller acts of teamwork that contribute to the overall success of the organisation. Both kinds of recognition combined gives employees a stronger sense that they are valued. Saying a regular thank you also builds trust and rapport that incentivises people to do their best work.

5. Celebrate success

Publish who has been rewarded via your incentive scheme through monthly newsletters and social channels. Also, give those people a voice. Ask them to share their tips for achieving success, how they will spend their reward and what they’re aiming to achieve next. This will help to raise awareness of your scheme and drive ongoing engagement.

6. Make rewards and incentives consistent

If you have implemented a digital rewards and recognition platform, use the management information it provides to ensure that incentives are being distributed equitably and consistently across your organisation. Word will soon spread if it isn’t – which could have a negative impact on overall workforce motivation. If appropriate, you can also use the data to ensure you are meeting DE&I targets.

7. Ease the administration burden

 As administrator and owner of the incentive programme, make sure you also do yourself a favour. Modern recognition and reward platforms provide you with all the tools you need to set up, automate, and communicate your incentive programmes online with ease. As well as helping to ensure you provide an efficient and effective scheme that is truly valued by your employees – this will help you save many hours of admin time.