Need to know
- Contemporary motivation schemes, including digital rewards and points programmes, should sit alongside more traditional employee benefits rather than be mutually exclusive.
- Employers are still recognising and rewarding talent through loyalty milestones but over shorter periods of time, such as at one-year rather than five-year increments.
- Employers are also making more of other employee milestones, such as birthdays and hitting targets, and using these as a substitute to long-service awards.
It could be argued that the days of the apocryphal nine-to-five, spending a decade working your way up in an organisation and being rewarded with a gold watch, final salary pension scheme or private medical insurance are becoming obsolete.
These days, generation Y, otherwise known as the millennials, work at least five to nine jobs in a lifetime and want different things, such as freedom, flexibility, and fun from their employer.
Deloitte's Millennial survey, published in January 2017, found that 38% of millennials, those employees born after 1982, would leave their current employer within two years, and only 31% would stay beyond five years.
The notion of a job-for-life no longer really exists, says Colin Hodgson, sales director at Edenred UK. “This is partly due to young people’s need for career progression but also, social media enablement means greater access to information and, subsequently, opportunities, hence shorter employment with organisations than previous generations,” he explains.
Job hopping is, however, not just exclusive to millennials and is part of a growing trend, says Wendy Melville, head of marketing at Personal Group. “Staff turnover can actually be a good thing and not something that business leaders should fixate on,” she says. “It’s not [the] tenure of the employee that matters but their contribution. Employees may be leaving but others are flowing in and that brings new talent, new ideas, fresh enthusiasm and aspirations.”
Recognise contributionWhereas the emphasis used to be more on rewarding loyalty and long service, the focus now should be more on staff contribution, productivity, and performance. “This could include the nomination of an employee of the month to help facilitate greater team bonding; award presentations which highlight employees as positive role models; and a rolling programme of perks where employees can pick and choose the rewards that mean the most to them,” says Melville.
Such motivation schemes must, however, be flexible and tailored to the manager and their team. “The focus of any motivation scheme should be three-fold: better job satisfaction, productivity and retention,” says Melville. “A scheme which recognises achievement and effort to make staff feel happier and valued will make them want to work harder and that creates a ripple of positive effects across the organisation.”
It is more about maximising performance than longevity, says James Kelly, director at Red Letter Days Motivates. “That said, it is still imperative that the employer has the right culture, package, rewards, benefits and wellbeing offering to ensure that [it is] doing [its] utmost to encourage longevity,” he adds.
Loyalty milestonesEmployers are still doing their best to retain talent by rewarding and recognising loyalty milestones but over shorter periods of time. “Whereas the age-old tradition was to provide long-service awards at five-year increments, it is now popular to offer lower reward amounts at one-year increments,” says Kelly.
Organisations are also making more of other employee milestones, such as birthdays and hitting targets. “Employees’ birthdays are being celebrated in a more organised fashion and, in some instances, are being used instead of long-service awards,” says Kelly. “We are finding that a number of [employers] are keeping long-service in place but are reducing the reward level and adding an ongoing recognition and motivation platform using the budget that they have saved.” This encourages ongoing loyalty and motivation throughout the employee lifecycle, whether that be six months or six years.
Incentive schemes should be an ongoing initiative and part of the organisation's culture. These should sit alongside the more traditional perks, such as employee discounts and salary sacrifice arrangements, rather than be mutually exclusive.
Points programmes, which allow multiple initiatives to be accessed via one platform, can be an effective way of combining the two, says Kelly. Such schemes can include peer-to-peer nominations, e-thank you cards, suggestion schemes, and learning and development programmes.
Digital reward schemes are also becoming increasingly popular, says Hodgson. “In the hyper-connected world we live in today, we have all become used to an online world where everything we engage with is easy, fun and instant,” he adds. “Just as we gain continual feedback and validation from our devices and social media in almost real-time because we’re constantly plugged in and turned on, we have the same expectations of reward and recognition in the workplace.”
One of Edenred’s latest online reward platforms includes, for example, a range of instant reward incentives including vouchers, retail cards, e-gift cards and experience days. “Organisations [that] have yet to embrace the social and digital age and continue to operate more traditional, offline recognition programmes may need to give more consideration to their evolving workforce,” says Hodgson.
What employees wantEmployers are focusing more on employee profiling and trying to understand their employees, says Yves Duhaldeborde, director of talent and rewards at Willis Towers Watson. He predicts that employee profiling will become a growing trend with increasing numbers of organisations looking to gather data on what makes their employees tick.
“Employers are definitely starting to realise that there are a number of other things they can offer employees rather than job security,” says Duhaldeborde. Namely, employee wellbeing, including financial wellbeing and education, ongoing training and providing a sense of connection through social media.
“Ultimately, our attitudes to work have changed over the years and that it’s not just millennials who value wellbeing and career progression,” Duhaldeborde says. “We are, as a whole population, less willing to give our whole lives to work.”
