Incentivising employees – The importance of reward and recognition

In our last few Pathfinder: Business update newsletters, we have been discussing different ways to incentivise your employees. This has included looking at share option schemes and employee ownership trusts. However, there are also lots of non-directly financial rewards to consider which might be simpler mechanisms to reward your team.

Rewarding and recognising employees leads to greater employee engagement, which can increase retention and help create a more positive overall workplace and will result in higher productivity and therefore output. It is also likely to attract the best talent to your workforce. We have set out below a few straightforward options:

Offering Perks

Think about whether there are non-salary perks you could offer that could be just as highly valued as a pay rise. For example more holiday. This could be as simple as allowing all your employees to take their birthday as annual leave, in addition to their standard holiday entitlement. Or you could go as far as offering a sabbatical to loyal employees as a reward for staying with you.

Employee perks could include allowing flexibility in their hours worked or the ability to work from home on occasions. You might also allow them to take unpaid leave if they need more time off than their holiday entitlement allows, for example, to cover childcare during school holidays.

For high-performing employees, these additional benefits of working for your business will be repaid in additional effort throughout their careers.

Employee well-being

At Kreston Reeves we have found our employee wellbeing programme to be really important for employee engagement. It is a simple fact – happy employees perform better. Our wellbeing initiatives have ranged from meditation sessions to healthy team breakfasts. There are so many ideas online that you can use to support your teams wellbeing. It will reduce staff absences and improve resilience. The initiative must be led from the top though. The right culture and values are crucial to the success of the programme.

Training

Employee training is usually undertaken for practical purposes for the smooth running of the organisation and to keep up with changes in the market. Training when well delivered can also boost the feeling of value in employees and shows you are committed to them. Employees who get regular opportunities to learn, develop, and advance are more likely to stay with a company. Training can include technical updates but don’t forget soft skills training such as teamwork, leadership, and communication which will develop your employees and make them more effective in the workplace.

In summary, there are a few key points to consider when deciding how to reward your employees: be fair, be consistent and be realistic. There will be a financial implication of any reward but try to consider the bigger long-term picture and impact when you are deciding your strategy.

If you would like to look at the different ways you can incentivise your employees, then get in touch with us.