Employee Incentive Programs: Getting off to a Great Start

Setting up an employee incentive program can take a lot of time and effort. You have to find a provider you think has the right software and rewards at the right price. You have to build your employee incentive website, setup your goals and budget. Once you have gotten through all of this, you probably wanted to breeze through the launch and move on to your next big project. Your work could really go to waste if you don’t take a couple more weeks to help see the incentive program through its initial launch. There are three key areas I would like to outline that most of our clients don’t anticipate working through. Our experience has shown that the clients who stick with the program through the kick off phase get better results.

Handing off the program to managers
Even though you were the person who evaluated incentive program providers, came up with the goals, got the higher ups to approve the budget and worked with the provider to get everything setup exactly the way you envisioned, you may not be actually administering the program after its inception. If this is the case, then getting managers involved early in the process is important so they understand the employee incentive program’s importance and are confident in their role in the program. If you have waited until after decisions were made, you can still ask managers for their feedback and work with them to make sure the incentive program is not a burden but rather an outlet for them to recognize deserving employees. Managers often know they should recognize employees outside of annual performance reviews, but often don’t have the tools to do it. By implementing an employee incentive program, you’ve given them employee recognition tools and need to make sure they know how to use them.

If your company’s managers are not on board with a program, and you don’t have buy-in from them, your program is likely to fail. I have worked on a couple of programs that languished and became stagnant a couple of months after it was implemented. When the manager in charge of the program was replaced, and a new person came in, all of a sudden our efforts to get the employee incentive program going started to pay off. During our weekly account manager meetings, we often like to joke that we have a point of contact who is a cheerleader, someone who will champion the incentive program and cheer it on to everyone else, making it so much more successful. By getting your managers involved and making the incentive program work for them, you can ensure the team will help the program succeed.

Communicating the program to employees
I tend to think of the proverbial philosophical question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”, when I think about employee incentive program communication. If you setup your program and walk away, no one is going to know or care about it. At that point, it may as well not exist. I am assisting in the setup of a few incentive programs this month. As I meet with clients and help to keep the implementation moving along, I’ve been working hard to make sure we have a lot of options when it comes to employee communication. From emails and flyers that will help to promote the goals and let people know how to log in to kickoff cards that people can hold onto so they always have the website and login information in their wallet, we want to make sure people become aware of the program. Specifically we want employees to know how to access it, what they can do to earn points and what they can spend their points on. There are currently 7 different online and in print supplements we are creating for clients to ensure only people living under a rock with no access to Wi-Fi won’t get the message about the new employee incentive program.

Ensuring a follow up plan
After you’ve gotten managers involved and made a communication plan, your last step to ensure incentive program success is to develop a follow up plan. We like to monitor programs closely for the first 4 weeks, and then depending on the results, continue to look at the program weekly or move to monthly reports. Initially we are looking at login rates to find out if people got the message and started to check out the website. We are also looking at the number of points being awarded by administrators to make sure everyone is using the employee incentive program and recognizing employees with the tools available. Additionally, we are looking at what the most popular goals are and what sorts of items are being ordered. Although Awards Network includes this follow up in all of its incentive programs, depending on the provider you partner with, you may need to make sure someone is monitoring the program results and making changes when necessary.

By seeing the employee incentive program through its initial launch, you will help increase program awareness, manager buy-in, number of goals reached and the budget used. After all, you’ve worked so hard to set everything up, why not spend a little extra time before moving onto the next thing?