How to implement successful employee incentive schemes

Incentive schemes are arrangements where employers offer extra support and incentives for employees. This can help boost employee engagement and help position your company as one that not only says that they care about their employees but puts initiatives in place to show it.

How can they help support your employees?

Employee incentive schemes can help support your employees in many ways, depending on what their needs are and how they use them.

On a top level they can help to make employees feel valued, help them develop in their role and take control of their career. It can also help employees feel more satisfied at work.

Away from their career, incentive schemes can help boost a person’s wellbeing and depending on the scheme used, can help an employee’s financial situation.

Ways to implement good incentive schemes

Whilst offering incentive schemes is a good step in supporting employees, ensuring that they are as good as they can be is important too. Here are some tips on how to implement a good incentive scheme:

Make sure everyone is included

Your employee base will be wide and include people in lots of different situations.

A consideration to make when implementing incentive schemes is how you can include everyone.

It’s important to make sure that all employees can make use of incentive schemes. This means that no matter an employee’s role or working schedule, they should be able to benefit from incentive schemes.

Another consideration is that your employees will have different needs and situations. Employee surveys and informal conversations are a great way to gather this information.

Promotion

Another way to implement good incentive schemes is to make sure they are well promoted.

You can have the most useful and exciting incentive schemes but if your employees aren’t aware of them then they won’t be utilised well.

Promoting the schemes to current and prospective employees can help to get them excited about what’s on offer and understand how they can use it. It’s also a good way to motivate teams to achieve the rewards on offer to them.

Two-way conversations

One way to implement successful employee incentive schemes is to ensure that there are open conversations between you and employees. This ensures that not only are you aware of their needs and wants but that you also gather feedback on how your incentive schemes are supporting employees and how they could potentially be improved.

Understanding how employees are engaging with employee incentive schemes or in some cases, why they aren’t, can help you to make changes to drive engagement and make sure that employees feel like these schemes are a valuable part of the proposition you offer them.

Utilise the right technology

The final way to implement a good set of incentive schemes is to use the right technology.

One way to do this is by using a benefits platform. If you find a supplier that offers a platform to house all your benefits, then this can help to make your employee incentive schemes easy to access for your employees and easy for you to manage as the employer.

Examples of incentive schemes

Employee benefits schemes

Employee benefit schemes are a great way to boost your employee engagement and satisfaction levels. Providing employee benefits that fit your employees’ needs and wants can help them feel heard and supported.

There’s a range of options to ensure that no matter what situation your employees are in, they can make use of their employee benefits.

Discover our range of employee benefits and how they could help your team.

Reward & recognition

Providing any schemes will help your employees to feel more valued at your company. However, reward and recognition schemes are specifically designed to ensure that employees feel valued and appreciated for the work they do.

Whatever you’re wanting to reward or recognise your employees for, there are a range of non-monetary and monetary rewards available.

Non-monetary rewards include things like longer lunch breaks and early finishes. Both of which can help your employees succeed at work but also make more time for their well-being and personal lives.

Monetary rewards could be one off bonuses added to an employee’s monthly salary or a monetary value placed on a voucher to spend at a specific retailer or between several retailers if they wish.

Work-life balance

Rewarding & recognising your employees can go further than rewarding them for a job well done though.

Giving your employees time to work on their own projects, or an extra day of annual leave helps to ensure that they can create a good work-life balance and spend more time on what makes them happy outside of work.

As people managers, there are many challenges such as recruiting and retaining top talent and supporting employees with their overall wellbeing. Incentive schemes can help you with these challenges in a sustainable, easy to manage way.

For more, check out our comprehensive guide to employee incentive schemes and how they can help your business and your team.