Choosing Our Incentive Programs, Part I
The choice to even enter into an employee recognition program - for our company - was a long time in coming. We had known for some time that we needed to up the ante when it came to taking care of our employees. We spend a lot of money finding, training and grooming the right people so that they will one day become seasoned members of our team; but what we had been finding is that we were dropping the ball past this point. That once they were trained and were “in the groove” so to speak most employees felt that they were left out to dry. They were unhappy and felt unheard; and unhappiness among employees breeds high turnover; plain and simple. We needed to step up the plate in terms of taking care of the people that mattered to us and we needed to do it quickly We chose incentive programs.
A rewards program would allow us to stand behind our words with our employees. We could say how great they were doing, how much we appreciated them until we were blue in the face. But what did that really mean in the end? Our employees needed to see something from us. Salary increases and bonuses were great but what could motivate them on a daily basis to keep up the good fight?
We knew many other businesses that had benefited from their own employee program and they did not have to make a huge financial investment in order to make it happen. This was important for us; we needed to be able to hit the ground running with this but we didn’t have a lot of cash on our side - at least not right now. So we set out to talk to the professionals who could help us set up incentive programs that would work for our current circumstances and ultimately grow with our company.
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