Retaining employees in business can be difficult with the amount of corporate competition around but pay scales can offer you necessary industry comparison data for making executive remuneration decisions. In addition to effective reward strategies that assist in making individuals feel valued, leading to boosted employee productivity in the workplace.
Reward strategies in the workplace should cover four key areas; recognition, appreciation, reward and benefits. The reward can be the end goal, but a lot can be said for recognising when employees have worked hard or brought value to the company. In fact, over 70% of employees show increased productivity when appreciation was given by their employer for working hard.
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Recognising Performance
An aspect of recognising employee achievements is to consider their overall performance, rather than assessing individuals on how long they spend working. Efficient work comes from consistent contribution to the company and closely following organisational values.
Businesses that show regular recognition to their workforce have been proven to vastly outperform their competitors who offered little-to-no employee recognition. This also proved positive when it came to retaining workers where individuals who were shown gratitude for their efforts were less likely to leave. In addition, recognising efforts both small and large is a good way to build trust with employees and show them their hard work is appreciated, regardless of the outcome.
Appreciating Good Behaviour
Not just for encouraging positivity in employees and assisting in making them feel valued, appreciation shown for good team relations encourages good interpersonal relationships. Building happy teams that not only work well individually but inspire employees to work more productively with each other.
Showing indifference or appreciation to toxic employees that discourage good working relationships can have severe negative effects so close attention should be paid to those that genuinely build the team up. As opposed to causing disorder or making other employees in the workplace feel discouraged or defeated.
Benefits That Outplay the Competition
Benefits, although another type of reward, is potentially the key factor when winning important hires for your organisation.Quality benefits that offer support and/or optional routes of progress for your employees are a good selling point. In addition, employees are more eagerly engaged when given opportunities for business travel, team-building sessions or exhibition attendance.
Benefits don’t have to be grandiose or go against company values, something as simple as closing between Christmas and New Year, not only is a positive benefit but shows employees you value their personal lives too.
Implement the Reward Strategy
While most businesses will consider compensation the most important reward, a lot of value lies outside basic monetary awards. Time is considered high up in the priority list of many younger workers in the work-force so consider offering opportunities for additional paid-leave. Encourage opportunities for employees to get together for paid lunches or dinners, where they also get a chance to socialise outside the working environment.
Taking the time to hand write or compose a thank you note to a hard-working employee summarising why they deserve the thanks and what you value about them is a great method of reward that incorporates both recognition and appreciation.
Does your company have an existing reward strategy? It could be time to review it, regular reviews with input from actively working employees are a great way of targeting rewards to individuals. Any monetary or gift reward can be catered to a specific worker, which contributes towards employees feeling like they have value to the company and management.
Alternatively, to assist in increased productivity, it’s important to ensure your workforce is paid competitively to the industry, this can be achieved using pay scale data to compare industry salaries. Well-paid workers often work harder to ensure they feel like they earnt the higher wage, more about pay benchmarking can be found here.
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