Recognize and Reward Good Behavior
Hiring new employees that fit your company culture and brand is just the start to successful staffing. Now, you need to keep all of your employees happy and engaged to make sure they stay with you!
An easy way to make employees feel good is to recognize and reward good behavior. By rewarding good behavior, you reinforce behavior you want to see more of throughout your team. While many companies reward employees by providing commissions for sales, what we’re talking about here is recognition and reward for positive employee behavior that may or may not be related to sales. For example, taking the lead on a new project, having a great interaction with a customer, going the extra mile to help out a co-worker, etc.
Before you instill an employee reward program, it’s important to ask yourself what type of behavior you want to reinforce. Are you looking to better your customer service? Or, do you want to keep your “back of the house” cleaner and more organized? Or, do you want to increase the speed in which orders are processed? By isolating the behaviors that you want to improve, opportunities for rewarding these behaviors becomes easier to spot.
Also, it’s important to determine what type of rewards are important to your employees. Maybe you think free movie tickets would be a great reward, but they might prefer a gift card to a local salon, or free coffee for the week.
While exciting for the entire team, spontaneous reward programs require vigilance on the part of the leadership, as you’ll always have to be looking for behaviors to reinforce. If you “forget” to do it one week, and then a second week, the program doesn’t appear important to you, and soon, it won’t be important to your employees.
It’s also important to verbalize your appreciation of your employees’ good behaviors. Sometimes hearing, “The way you handled that difficult phone call was really impressive. Keep up the good work!” is worth more than a tangible reward.
What are other situations that warrant a reward? What are some other ways to show your employees you care about them? Share your ideas with us here!
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