Dos and Don’ts for Employee Reward Schemes

At Loyalty Works, we specialise in the design, implementation and management of incentive and reward schemes for customers, employees, and business partnerships. In our extensive experience, we have come to know some hard and fast rules for what you should and shouldn’t do with your employee reward schemes.

Recognising your employees isn’t just a question of good practice, it’s a question of necessity, to build an inclusive culture of engaged employees whose loyalty drives your business's success. With a well-thought-out employee rewards scheme, you have the potential to transform your workplace by motivating your teams, encouraging their innovation, and focusing them on their goals to drive meaningful results for you and your business.

But in the pursuit of this, we need to stretch a bit further than simple surface-level gestures. Instead, we need to focus on carefully designed, inclusive and meaningful rewards that align with what truly matters to your people.

So to help you navigate the best practices when it comes to employee engagement and rewards, we have created a guide to our key Dos and Don’ts when it comes to building an employee rewards scheme that really works.

The Dos

To begin with, let's look at our Dos ­- the rules and practices we can follow to ensure an employee reward scheme resonates with your employees and pays dividends to both them and you.

Do Recognise a Variety of Contributions: In the machine of business every employee has a role to play, every little cog counts, not just the engines and the wheels, so it’s important that a strong rewards scheme includes every employee in its scope and celebrates a wide range of achievements to bring recognition to all of your employees. From everyday problem-solving and teamwork, to creativity and customer service excellence, recognising a variety of contributions helps to build a more inclusive and motivated workforce in which all of your employees feel seen and valued.

Do Combine Monetary and Non-Monetary Rewards: Financial incentives are always welcome, everyone appreciates a bonus in their payslip, but meaningful rewards go beyond the simple value money can offer. Your employees value experiences too, the opportunity to develop and grow just as much as they enjoy bonuses, vouchers, and gift cards. So, make sure your reward roster provides a variety of meaningful rewards to ensure your scheme appeals to the full spectrum of motivation.

Do Ensure Fairness, Transparency and Regular Reviews: As we can see, one of the main themes of a good reward scheme is inclusivity, ensuring that your motivators, goals, and subsequent rewards can touch all the different kinds of people you employ and a mainstay of ensuring this is transparency. When your reward scheme has clear and transparent criteria, it helps your employees know exactly where they are at and how they can improve, as well as what they gain for improving or meeting the goals and challenges set forth by the reward scheme. This also helps to build trust and can be amplified with regular reviews in which the employees can give feedback on the reward scheme and know that their voice and opinion truly matters.

Do Involve Employee Feedback: Implementing employee feedback is critical; it is one thing to listen to their feedback and give them the opportunity to voice their opinion, but ensuring those opinions and that feedback are translated into action is a must if you want your workforce to feel valued. This connects your employee rewards scheme to the real needs of your workforce by listening and acting on what you hear.

Do Encourage Peer-to-Peer Recognition: A reward scheme should be an extension of a motivating and rewarding workplace culture, and one of the best ways to establish this kind of forward-thinking, tightly knitted team is to ensure that your employees can support, reward and recognise each other too. When employees recognise and celebrate each other’s achievements and successes directly, you help to foster a stronger sense of community, a more vibrant team spirit and ensure recognition is part and parcel of your employees' everyday culture and not just a special event.

The Don’ts

So, now we’ve covered the things we absolutely feel should be included as part of every employee reward scheme we help build, it’s time to dive into some of the things we absolutely must avoid at all costs, our Don’ts.

Don’t Focus Solely on High Performers: Focusing on the best-performing employees can seem beneficial, to keep the best of the team working their hardest, but unfortunately, doing so can often alienate the rest of the staff and make the contribution of other employees feel less valuable. It can also begin to instil a sense of competition in your workforce when co-operation is what you’re aiming for. So ensure your rewards scheme values consistency, growth, teamwork, and effort, and not just the highest sales or the most standout results.

Don’t Use a One-Size-Fits-All Approach: Each of your employees is unique, and each one deserves rewarding in the way that is meaningful to them. Whether this is ensuring employees are recognised for their individual contributions or are rewarded with something appropriate to them, building versatility and inclusivity into your reward scheme tells all of your employees they are seen, heard and valued, enhancing team spirit and workforce motivation.

Don’t Set it and Forget It: Like your employees, a reward scheme is a living and growing thing; it has to adapt to the needs of your employees and the challenges they face and the goals you wish for them to achieve. Listening to employee feedback and modifying your reward scheme to make it relevant to the moment is always good practice to ensure your scheme feels fresh and continues to inspire and engage your employees over the long term.

Conclusion: The Final ‘Do’

The final advice we will give is to ensure you work alongside professionals who have experience in crafting, curating, and managing employee reward schemes. By partnering with accomplished professionals, you'll find the creation and implementation of your employee reward scheme to be that much smoother.

Loyalty Works offers comprehensive packages to design, build, and implement your rewards scheme, as well as sourcing and fulfilling the subsequent rewards you choose for your employees. We know that rewarding your employees is about inclusivity, personability and individuality, because seeing each of your employees in turn builds a stronger and more connected workforce where each employee can thrive, and so can your business.

If you’re interested in creating a thoughtful and inclusive rewards scheme, aligned with your employees’ real needs, then reach out and get in touch with The Loyalty Works team today, and together we can build a rewards strategy that recognises your people, the right way.