Points Programs

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Stages of Employee Incentive Programs: Implementing your Program

For the third installment of the ongoing stages of incentive programs series, I am providing insight on the implementation stage. So far in this series, I have covered the planning and budgeting phases of starting an incentive program and the implementation stage is where all of your careful planning will pay off as you set up online and printed components, create accounts for all participants, determine how points will be added and train administrators in preparation of kicking off your program.

Setting up the Employee Incentive Program Website and Supplements
When you partner with a reward program provider, you should be able to have all online and print components of your incentive program set up for you. Incentive websites can mirror an existing website or can be customized with a new design or award program theme. Online incentive programs are often set up on the industry standard of a half cent per point but can utilize any point scale you would like to use.

Employee incentive program websites include the standard pages necessary for the website to function but you can also add pages that make sense for your reward program. The standard content of an incentive website includes instructions, program goals, account information, online reward catalog, cart and checkout pages. In addition to these pages, you may want to add peer nomination forms, newsletters, quizzes and many other pages that will enrich the website. While implementing your incentive program, you will need to consider all of these aspects of your online components.

Employee incentive program supplements are vital for consistent communication. For an online reward program, the most commonly used communication device is emails. Your company may want flyers, statements, posters, announcements and award catalogs designed an in-hands for the kickoff of the program. During the implementation stage, you will need to consider how you will be communicating with participants and what these media will look like.

Creating Participant Accounts
Prior to kicking off an online incentive program, you will need to set up accounts for all of your participants. Each account will need a unique piece of information for the participant’s username, which can be an employee or customer ID, an email address or the person’s name. Depending on your reporting needs, your organization may want to group participants by a department or location and while developing a list of accounts to create, you should also consider whether you would like people grouped a certain way.

Determining how Points will be Awarded
When your participants begin to earn points, you will need to set a process for assigning points and tracking whether or not points have been added to online accounts. Generally, managers will assign points to the people who they supervise and then send over a spreadsheet of who earned points for specific goals to a Human Resources Administrator. This main administrator then adds the points into online accounts or sends them over to the reward program provider to be loaded. Some of my clients will set up online administrative accounts for managers so that they do not have to go through another person to assign points to their employees.

Training Administrators and Familiarizing Management with the Program
Depending on whether your company would like to maintain users, add points and run reports or if you would like your reward program provider to do so, you should schedule time to train administrators and sub-administrators. Additionally, you will also want to announce the incentive program to all levels of management and walk them through the reason for the program, the goals of the program and how the incentive program website and supplements will work. As you familiarize managers with the reward program, be sure to note any suggestions they have and tweak the program if necessary or keep a list of suggestions to review after the ramp-up period.

Although implementing an employee incentive program covers a lot of ground, most of the major decisions about the reward program were already made in the first two stages. By laying down a proper foundation for how the incentive program will work and defining your budget and goals, the guts of the incentive program will be managed much more easily. Check back on December 27 to read about the next stage of an incentive program, kicking off the program!

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