Creating Custom Employee Incentives That Work

More companies today realize the value of strategic employee incentive programs for attracting, motivating, and retaining their workforce. Nevertheless, effective incentives are not one-size-fits-all. According to the good folk at Motivation Excellence, to truly inspire people and impact performance, incentives need to be customized to align with an organization’s unique culture, objectives and what resonates with their specific employee base. Here’s how to create custom employee incentives that genuinely move the needle.

Understand Your Workforce

Before designing incentives, gather insights into the demographics, interests, and motivators of your employee population. Surveys, focus groups and analyzing data around popular existing perks provide a valuable roadmap for where to focus. The more incentives align with the actual wants and needs of your teams, the more engaging they will be.

Align With Goals

Any effective incentive program needs to ladder back up to clearly defined business objectives you wish to drive and behaviors you aim to promote. Custom employee incentives should be purposefully structured to incentivize specific high-value goals, KPIs and performance metrics that are priorities. Common targets include productivity, customer satisfaction, sales, safety, and attendance.

Get Leader Buy-In

For incentive initiatives to work long-term, leadership across all levels must be fully committed to both the strategy and consistent promotion. Involve executives and managers early in the creation process to secure buy-in and ongoing support. Their visible championing of the custom employee incentives is critical for widespread adoption by the workforce.

Mix Rewards and Recognition

While compensation and tangible perks are powerful motivators, research shows employees equally value social recognition and feelings of appreciation. Create a balanced approach blending monetary rewards like bonuses, prizes, and experiential incentives alongside peer recognition platforms, public shout-outs, and accolades for standout performance.

Foster Healthy Competition

Adding elements of friendly competition and game mechanics into incentive structures can be highly engaging and drive participation in fun ways. Leaderboards, team competitions, achievement badges and point accumulation simulate rewarding experiences that tap into people’s innate desires for status and bragging rights within custom employee incentives.

Keep It Simple

Despite best intentions, overly complex incentive systems with confusing metrics or reward difficulties can backfire and disengage people more than motivate. Simple, transparent incentives with clear goals, attainable but desirable rewards, and easy redemption are most successful. 

Ensure Attainability

Incentives are most effective when they feel like achievable reaches rather than seemingly impossible targets. Thoroughly model out reward criteria to strike the right motivating balance of challenging but reasonable goals for your employee population. Unrealistic expectations breed disengagement.

Make It Flexible

Some employees may covet bonus cash, while others prefer experiential rewards or workplace privileges. Incorporate flexibility and choice within your incentive platform so individuals can redeem earned rewards for what is most personally compelling and meaningful to them. One-size incentives do not maximize engagement.

Promote Inclusivity

Creating a fair incentive program design is essential to encourage participation and avoid any feelings of exclusion or unfairness. Ensure all major teams, roles and demographics have equal ability to partake. Avoid inadvertently designing custom employee incentives only attainable or appealing to certain groups of employees.

Keep It Fresh

The most powerful incentives constantly evolve and reset to provide new engagement drivers and prevent stagnation. Plan to rotate reward types, tweak metrics, change up competition formats and add new surprise incentives regularly to spike interest and joy around achieving fresh goals.

Conclusion

Building custom employee incentives around the unique makeup of your organization takes work, but pays dividends through higher participation, motivation, and business results alignment than generic programs provide. Investing in understanding your workforce’s personal and professional incentive drivers means companies can create strategic rewards and recognition that genuinely inspire people.