Reward employees often

Unemployment may be at 9.6%, but it’s rare to find any employee in America who says there is 9.6% less work to do. In fact, it is just the opposite. Employees are working harder. How do we reward this hard work? The trend in 2010 was to unfreeze pay and reinstate 401k programs. Without spending millions, leaders can go a step further.Erik Mosely of Globoforce recently told Fortune magazine that what really works for a budget-constrained company is the things you might dismiss as kindergarten stuff; small rewards, all the time, to almost everyone. “Even high earners can appreciate a small award if it is unexpected,” He says. By studying employee satisfaction rates, he discovered that the best systems had similar and very surprising characteristics.

1) Share the wealth: About 80% to 90% of employees should get some reward every year.

2) Small bucks beat big ones: The average prize should be just $110. Smaller prizes can seem insignificant, but larger ones don’t motivate any better.

3) Weekly, not quarterly: Every week, 5% of employees should get an award. Any less frequently and people will forget about the program.

If we can all agree that continually rewarding staff members with kind words of recognition and prizes of about $100 is a good idea, the next question is – what type of prize?

At a recent Frost and Sullivan event attended by heads of sales for some of the largest companies in the world, the low-value prize was a success. In order to get these highly compensated, very busy execs to attend all events and stay on schedule, they gave away iPods, Tom-Toms and Flip Cameras. As a winner of a Tom-Tom, I proudly carried it with me all day. Only later, when I called to tell my wife about my big win did I learn that those now go for $59.

Some would argue cash or gift cards are the way to go. Kathleen D. Vohs has been publishing some very interesting research in the past few years about how people react to cash. She recently asked some subjects to count cash and others to count slips of paper. Then, she asked the subjects to dip their hands in extremely hot water or play a computer game in which, unbeknownst to them, they’d be excluded by other players. The hand dippers were asked to rate their pain and the game players to rate their feeling of exclusion. Those who had counted money felt less pain and less excluded. The finding: cash gives people an inner strength and can reduce their physical and emotional pain. In fact, simply the idea of cash has this effect.

Whether you use cash or prizes, reward people often and let them know they are appreciated.

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photo by Katrina Snaps. Used by permission.