Your ultimate guide to employee reward schemes

A well-designed employee reward scheme can completely transform your business. By recognising and rewarding your employees’ hard work and achievements, you can retain your talented employees and boost engagement, motivation and productivity!

Employee reward and recognition schemes are now the norm in many workplaces, so failing to offer one can mean your business gets left behind. In this ultimate guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about employee incentives and rewards schemes, including:

• What is an employee reward scheme?
• The benefits of reward schemes for employees
• Types of employee rewards
• Employee rewards vs recognition 
• How to create the best employee rewards 

What is an employee reward scheme?

An employee reward scheme is designed to incentivise employees by offering monetary and non-monetary rewards for their work. This can include everything from access to special discounts for working at a particular company to seasonal bonuses to a team holiday for exceptional performance. 

What are the benefits of an employee reward scheme?

Increase productivity 

Recognising your employees for their achievements at work can motivate them to focus and work harder. Creating a positive work environment where productivity and hard work are rewarded ensures that all work is of a high standard and everyone works to the best of their ability. Plus, teams who are working to reach specific goals or benchmarks tend to be more productive than those who aren’t.

Engage and motivate employees

Offering rewards and incentives also helps motivate and keep your employees engaged. Unengaged employees tend to be less productive, take more sick days, and are likelier to leave the job. 

Ensuring all your employees are properly motivated is much easier with a comprehensive employee reward scheme. Offering recognition and valuable rewards for good work helps employees feel like they are getting something back for what they put into your business, and they’ll start to see your company’s success as linked to their own. This can even motivate employees to learn new skills to boost their performance. 

Improves employee retention

An effective employee reward scheme can improve employee retention rates and keep talented individuals in your organisation. Disengaged employees are around four times more likely to leave than engaged ones. It makes sense to invest in your current employees rather than have to hire and train new people constantly. 

Types of rewards for employees

Financial incentives

Employee rewards can be a financial incentive, such as a seasonal bonus. This helps to motivate employees to work hard and efficiently, especially if they’re motivated by money. 

In addition to bonuses, there are a couple of other financial incentives that you could include in your employee reward scheme:

• Stock options 
• Additional paid time off
• Profit-sharing schemes

Non-monetary incentives 

Non-monetary rewards are also commonly used as incentives. This can be a powerful way to motivate your employees or act as recognition for high performance or achievements. These can include:

• Remote working 
• Flexible working 
• Recognition for their achievements 
• Group trips 
• Event tickets 

Both monetary and non-monetary rewards can be performance or non-performance-based incentives. Performance-related rewards are linked to either an individual’s or a team’s performance. This helps to motivate employees to achieve results and is most common in sales and similar roles. 

Non-performance-related rewards are not linked to performance and are offered to all employees. This includes anything that’s an incentive to work at a particular organisation beyond base pay and standard time off. Company rewards might include extra time off, the ability to work remotely, reduced gym membership, or access to discounts or special offers. 

Employee rewards vs recognition

You might often hear the term ‘reward and recognition scheme’, but there is a distinction between offering an employee a reward and offering recognition. Employee recognition is just as important as offering rewards and involves recognising your employees for their hard work or achievements. This might involve peer-to-peer recognition, a certificate, or a shout-out on social media. Alternatively, you can use an employee recognition platform.

An effective reward scheme should use both social recognition and rewards to motivate and celebrate employees. This creates a company-wide culture where hard work is rewarded.

How to create the best employee rewards

Employee rewards can consist of simple incentives, such as gift cards or a monetary bonus. However, to fully engage team members and create a culture of productivity, creating unique sales incentives and employee rewards is the way forward. 

Working with a specialist agency means you’ll get bespoke incentives tailored to your team…

Bespoke sales incentive and employee reward schemes

At Another Way, we’re experts at creating genuinely inspiring incentives designed with your organisation in mind. Bespoke rewards are the best way to motivate and excite your sales team or workforce. 

Our years of experience and expertise ensure your reward scheme is well-thought-out and seamlessly implemented. From personalised sales incentives to comprehensive employee rewards and recognition schemes, you can rely on us to motivate and engage your team. 

We offer:

• Group incentives
• Group flights
• Sales incentive program management
• Employee reward and recognition programs 
• Incentive web platforms
• Communications programmes
• Programme design and branding

Give us a call at 0778 948 5123 or email us at [email protected] for more information about how we can help motivate your team.

Or complete our online form, and we’ll get in touch as soon as possible.