When you run a business, being able to get the best efforts from your employees on a daily basis is really important. But motivation looks different to every staff member. While many organisations successfully motivate their teams through annual bonuses or quarterly performance reviews, over time, these methods become less impactful.
The challenge with these traditional motivation strategies is timing. If milestones are too far out for employees, they’re likely to lose interest in achieving them. Even when an incentive or performance reward does arrive, the specific efforts or actions they took to receive it are often forgotten altogether.
Micro-incentives are an effective way around this issue. Instead of focusing on waiting for months or even a year for employees to receive a reward for their efforts, they’re given smaller, but still meaningful, signs of appreciation.
Below are different strategies you can use to start incorporating microincentives into your business.
Deconstruct Tasks to Identify Wins
There are a lot of businesses that have provisions in place to celebrate various company wins with employees. This might be to congratulate employees for meeting their milestone work years, signing up a new large customer, or hitting a specific profitability goal at the end of the year.
This is a great ritual to create in the business and can help boost morale across all departments. However, these one-time events don’t always capture all the individual efforts that employees make throughout the year. While some of the details might get included in company shoutouts or team announcements, many times, certain employees might feel like their contributions aren’t noticed as much as others.
This is where deconstructing larger tasks into smaller goals and trackable wins can be really impactful. When leadership teams take the time to identify smaller, but equally important contributions and assign wards to those actions, it can really help to build momentum in your teams.
Leverage the Psychology of Immediate Gratification
When you’re looking for ways to keep your employees actively engaged, it’s helpful to consider certain elements of behavioral science. For example, if an employee pulls an all-nighter to fix a critical operational issue in January, but doesn’t hear “good job” until a performance review in June, the connection is severed. The reward feels more transactional rather than positive reinforcement.
Micro-incentives are much more effective since timing becomes less of an issue. Rewards are received, such as a gift card or other financial incentive, right after certain actions are completed. The more this happens, the more it creates a positive association in the minds of employees. This makes it much more likely that employees will continue trying to carry out those actions moving forward.
Implement Variable Reward Schedules
It’s not always easy for management teams to see everything their teams do at all times. The challenge of top-down recognition frameworks is that they don’t really work well for distributed workforces where employees may work different schedules or operate outside of core business hours.
The solution for this setback is to create a more democratised format for employees. One way to do this is to allow employees to send out their own awards to one another.
For example, giving employees the ability to award small tokens or points to their peers captures the high-impact work that often flies under management teams’ radars. This also helps to shift the culture away from trying simply to compete for attention from managers to encouraging one another and showing mutual respect for accomplishments.
Get Into the Habit of Continuous Recognition
There is a common misconception about employee incentive programmes that will inevitably destroy company budgets. However, the reality is that smaller rewards sent more frequently can outweigh the value of larger rewards sent out less frequently. For example, a bonus of $50 now is often preferred over a $100 six months from now.
Higher volume, but lower costs, recognition models are much easier to scale while also being much more effective long-term. By recognising smaller contributions throughout the year, it becomes much easier to maintain morale over more extended periods and can actually cost a fraction of what traditional bonus structures do.
Design Incentives to Reinforce Intrinsic Motivation
Intrinsic motivation can be compelling in helping you to achieve various goals with your employees. While the reward might be an external, tangible incentive, the goal is actually to help turn that into an internal motivation trigger. This is much easier to achieve when feedback is immediate. Delayed rewards become too disconnected from the action and don’t register as strongly.
One way to reinforce intrinsic motivation is to invest in digital platforms or internal messaging tools that provide rewards to employees within minutes of achieving certain milestones.
PrioritiSe Non-Monetary Value and Experience
One thing to keep in mind when providing rewards to your employees is that not all of them value the same things. While a generic gift card might work well for some, this type of incentive can also sometimes feel a bit too impersonal.
Below are a few more affordable incentive options you can explore that are often easier to give out more frequently than others while still providing additional value to your employees:
- Experiential: Additional time off can often be a major motivation. You could consider offering employees the ability to leave two hours early on a Friday or even offering them a preferred parking spot.
- Social: Some people thrive on public display of recognition. Providing employees with a digital badge they can display on their messaging apps or a shout-out in the company newsletter, could be a powerful incentive for some.
- Developmental: For the career-focused, offering discount points toward a course, a book, or a subscription to a niche tool they’ve been asking for.
Capture Data for Actionable BehavioUral Insights
Micro-incentives are also a great way to collect helpful insights about your business. By tracking specific behaviours with certain rewards, such as cross-departmental collaboration or improved documentation, this can be a great way for company leaders to guide the team toward productive habits without micromanaging.
This leverages the concept of “loss aversion” in a positive way. Once employees see their fellow colleagues earning wins for specific actions, they naturally align their behavior to participate in that same success.
Review Incentive Programmes Regularly
The effectiveness of your incentive programme will likely change over time. Rather than setting them up and then assuming they’re going to continue to be valuable, it’s important to evaluate them over time.
Some of the important factors you should consider when analysing your programme include:
- Who is collaborating?
- What is being rewarded?
- Is the programme inclusive enough?
Answering each of these questions will help to ensure the programme is meeting all the core objectives you need it to.
Start Choosing the Right Incentives for Your Employees
Micro-incentives are a great way to ensure you’re actively supporting your employees and valuing their contributions all year long.
By following the strategies discussed, you can easily start to incorporate this form of recognition into your current workflows, helping you build a stronger company culture and more motivated employees.
Author: Cindy Mielke – Sr. Director, Product Management, Blackhawk Network, and Certified Professional of Incentive Management.
Photo credit: StockCake
