When most of us think of employee reward, we tend to focus on pay and benefits. In other words, salary and the other elements that make up the employment package.
But what about other aspects of reward?
By that, I mean how good is your business at recognising, celebrating and rewarding good performance and key behaviour traits?
Both performance and behaviour should be closely aligned to your company goals. So your company’s overarching goals should be broken down and appropriately apportioned to your team. For example, if your company goal is to increase sales by 20%, clearly each of your sales team will have this goal in their performance management targets for the year.
Performance is relatively easy to measure – your sales team have achieved the sales targets you gave them, your customer service team have answered 98% of calls within 3 rings etc.
However, behaviour is a little more tricky to evaluate. Behaviour can be seen as more subjective, so you need to ensure you have a robust process in place to reflect fairness and transparency.
Be clear about what behaviour traits are important to your business, and move you towards achieving the company goals. Hours at the desk might be relatively easy to measure, but does it mean your people are being efficient, or the business is gaining from that commitment?
Think about the aspects of your business you want to improve – customer service, efficiency etc and look at how to encourage behaviours to achieve this. You could ask for suggestions to enhance the customer experience, or better ways to handle key processes.
Don’t forget the power of recognition. It’s not always about financial reward.
To clarify – recognition is likely to come in the form of publicly acknowledging the part an employee has played, or their achievements. This may just be a thank you in a team meeting or could be a more formal approach such as employee awards.
Appreciation is about thanking a person for a contribution they have made – this is best achieved by a personal message from you, either in writing or in person.
How you decide to both reward and appreciate your team is up to you. But bear in mind that overblown thanks for every action soon dilutes the impact, so you may want a tiered approach to how you handle your thanks.
Every aspect of pay and benefits, including recognition and achievement needs to be designed with the company’s goals and objectives in mind.