7 reasons to reward your employees and improve moral!

In life, small actions can make a big difference, especially when they start to add up. There are many ways businesses can use this to their advantage. For example, regularly providing small rewards can encourage staff to stay for longer. This lowers the cost of recruitment and retention and minimises disruption. Here are some tips to help.

Remember the value of a thank you

You don’t need to thank people for doing their everyday work. It is, however, appropriate to thank them for going over and above minimum standards even if it’s only in a small way. Acknowledging the extra effort, they made shows that it’s been not just noted but appreciated. This encourages them to keep on putting in extra effort when appropriate.

Sharing really is caring

If someone does something worth highlighting, then be sure to highlight it. Regardless of whether you’re working on-site or remotely, you’ll be having meetings. You can shout it out then. Newsletters are another good option.

You can also empower your staff to make their own shoutouts. One option is to have staff funnel shoutouts through their line management. Another option, however, is to create a shoutout board where staff can leave their own messages.

If you’re on-site, having a physical board can be fun. If you’re remote, however, there are plenty of options. For example, you could have a Slack channel just for shoutouts and/or use a Google Jamboard.

Drop in small perks

Your company will probably have a range of standard perks (e.g., learning allowance and gym membership). You can, however, enhance this with small, ad-hoc perks. In principle, there doesn’t have to be a reason for these. In fact, sometimes it can be nice just to provide them as a surprise. Often, however, they can be gently linked with company goals.

For example, many companies are now incorporating environmental and social sustainability into their business goals. As part of this, they are often focussing strongly on staff health and well-being (mental and physical). Well-chosen gifts can be part of this strategy. In particular, they can be ways to get employees to try something new.

If you’re using small perks as a way to incentivise a particular sort of behaviour, then encourage employees to share their experience of it. For example, if you gift colouring books and pencils, then encourage employees to show off their completed pages.

Bring seasonal joy with seasonal gifts

In the UK, Christmas and Easter tend to be the major times for seasonal gifting. You can, however, set your own policy on it. For example, you might prefer to acknowledge the changing of the seasons or at least the transition from winter to spring and summer to autumn.

If you do choose to gift around Christmas and Easter, you can expect to have plenty of season-specific gifts to choose from. With that said, you don’t have to stick to them or at least to the traditional versions of them. Many companies are now bringing out more sustainable and/or healthier versions of old favourites.

For example, it’s now easy to find both promotional Easter eggs and advent calendars with fairly-traded and/or organic chocolate. You can also find vegan-friendly chocolate. This is often both highly sustainable and relatively healthy compared to traditional milk chocolate. It’s worth noting that the taste of high-quality vegan chocolate has really improved over recent years.

Alternatively, you can reference the season or occasion in other ways if you wish. For example, you could gift items that had seasonal imagery on them or were packaged/wrapped in a way that reflected the season.

This can be a nice way of creating a sense of fun and hence boosting the mood in your workplace.

Deepen connections with individual gifts

Similarly, you may wish to mark key occasions in an employee’s life. From an employment perspective, birthdays and/or employment anniversaries are obvious choices. These are happy occasions and apply to all employees.

With individual gifts, it can be challenging to find the right balance between personalising the gift and making sure that it is something the employee will actually want. One way to get around this is to send a personalised card but allow the employee some freedom to choose their own gift.

You could create your own gift catalogue of items you are willing to buy and let the employee choose from that. Alternatively, you could provide vouchers that cover a range of tastes. Either way helps to maximise the chance that the employee will find something meaningful to them and associate it with you.

Encourage healthy competition with prizes

Technically prizes are different from gifts. They are, however, still a form of reward and can definitely improve morale. Prizes recognize accomplishments. This can be as compared to other team members. It can also be as compared to an employee’s previous performance (or a team’s previous performance).

Using rewards can be a great way to get employees engaged in areas where they might otherwise have lacked enthusiasm. An obvious example of this is training related to compliance issues.

Employers will generally do what they can to make this training relevant to an employee’s job role. Realistically, however, this type of training often involves a lot of “base-covering”. In other words, there tends to be quite a bit of information employers put in just to tick compliance boxes.

Understandably, employees can often end up being less than enthusiastic about this kind of training. Having the carrot of a potential reward can, however, make it more interesting for them. This doesn’t have to be expensive. You can give each employee a digital certificate and provide rewards for specific achievements (e.g., top overall score).

Create memories with commemorative gifts

If your company, or even just a specific team, has a major occasion, then you may want to mark it by offering a commemorative gift. Even digital gifts create a link between the gift and the memory of the occasion. Tangible gifts can create an even stronger link. They can also be easily photographed. This can be useful if you use social media for brand building.