It is one thing to offer incentives for your employees to work harder. However, it is a completely different thing to encourage them to use the incentives smartly. Let us presume you offer a $100 gift card for the top performing employee of the month. This may be in addition to the extra commission and remuneration that all employees earn depending on the sales figures for the month.
Well, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries of all your employees. Use this information to your advantage to encourage employees to work harder. $100 gift card earned by an employee who has his or her anniversary in the month can be a great incentive. By doing so, you would be portraying yourself as a generous employer in more than one ways.
For starters, the employee will feel honored that you have tried to think for his or her marital bliss. Secondly, the word will spread that you are not just interested in sales figures but are interested in encouraging everybody to work harder.
Thirdly, you can offer tips and hints on the best way to spend the gift card. Finally, you may even offer to increase the amount from that month onwards if you feel that the employee will work harder as a result of this incentive.
Do this twice or thrice and you will find each and every individual with a birthday or anniversary at home working harder to reach the top level. You can even offer two gift cards for the top two employees to raise the stakes. You must understand these minor nuances and aspects of your business and employees to extract more work from them.
On the other hand, simply announcing that a gift card would be offered and treating it as a chore does not make sense. As an employer, your work is going to become a lot easier if you convince your employees to work harder. This may often require going beyond mere monetary benefits.
Just log on to Internet and check out better ways to remunerate employees for their hard work to improve employee relations.