employee reward

Affordable Ideas for Giving Back to Your Workers

By Brooke Chaplan

If you want to keep your employees motivated, it’s important to offer rewards and incentives for positive performance. Otherwise, employees can lose motivation which results in reduced productivity and high turnover rates. You might think of offering incentives as overhead in your budget, but this is not the case. Rewarding employees will encourage them to strive for peak performance, and you don’t have to go broke doing it. There are several affordable ways to show employees that they are valued. Showing appreciation is often more important than the monetary value of their gift, since employees simply want to know their efforts are noticed.

Parking Spot
Offering a preferred parking spot for a month is an often overlooked method of rewarding employees. The parking spot should be at or near the entrance. This reward is especially helpful in large companies where employees are required to walk through a large parking area. Offering a parking spot won’t cost anything, but is a great way to show employees they are valued. There should be a limit on how long the employee has access to the parking space. While it’s up to you to decide, the average is 30 days.

Free Lunch
A free lunch is another great way to reward positive performance. You don’t have to spend a lot on this, but the amount you spend do will be reflective of how much you value your top performers. Personalize the free lunches by offering a gift card to the employee’s favorite restaurant. It is common to provide dinner for two, which enables employees to bring a friend or a romantic partner. You could also offer several gift cards with different values and give them out to contest winners. While relatively inexpensive, offering a free lunch reminds employees that you care about and value them and their work.

Team Event
Instead of rewarding a single employee, consider rewarding the entire team, which will inspire teamwork and encourage members to encourage and hold each other accountable. There are many ways to reward your team, so try to base your decisions on their interests. Most respond well to having a pizza party at a bowling alley. Simple events such as this enable each employee to relax and bond with each other. Downtime and relaxing are important and contribute to enhanced productivity when the employees return to work.

If you want to stay productive, consider having the next corporate meeting at Noahs Event Venues or somewhere similar that will take care of the technical aspects and offer a fun place to present new ideas, work on trainings, or even just play games together. This is a great way to shake things up and show everyone you value their input and work.
Keep your employees motivated by offering good rewards and incentives. Most of which don’t have to be expensive. When employees feel valued, they are willing to work harder and add value to the team. Some simple ideas include offering a parking spot, free lunch, and taking the team out for a pizza party.

Brooke Chaplan is a freelance writer and blogger. She lives and works out of her home in Los Lunas, New Mexico. She loves the outdoors and spends most her time hiking, biking and gardening. For more information contact Brooke via Twitter @BrookeChaplan.