Bridging a Gap with an Employee Program, Part II
In the last post we talked about how our company had come to a place that so many eventually do - where our production was way up but our morale within the company was way down. We had experienced tremendous growth very quickly which was great in terms of the bottom line and our growing reputation in the industry but our employes were bearing the brunt of the additional work and were feeling very much out of the loop in terms of communication. We had found all these great ways to communicate with clients around the world but we were having trouble communicating even the simplest ideas to our employees. They felt cut off and as if their ideas were being overlooked as well as their needs. We implemented our employee program about this time with the help of a great company that helped us put it together and manage it.
We rolled out big with our employee program, offering vacations and big electronics to those employees who met specific goals in terms of production and safety. It was a huge hit and went a long way towards repairing employee/management relations. Plus because we were always changing goals and incentives we worked directly with employees to learn what they considered to be appropriate goals and interesting incentives - thus improving communication on a daily basis.
The program was in effect - successfully - for about a year when the economy crashed. We knew we had to make some adjustments but - because the program was already in place and they had experienced our commitment towards honoring their work - employees were nothing but supportive when we adjusted the prize incentives to a slightly less dramatic scale to account for our minimized budget. We are happy that incentive programs can be adjusted according to our needs and we’re equally thrilled that we can continue to offer our employees merit-based incentives.
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