I found this article, and thought it might help during the last weeks of 2009! :) Mary

Rewarding Employees Doesn’t Have to Cost a Fortune

Recognizing and rewarding employees is very important. It’s a way of applauding a job well-done or showing the people who work for you just how appreciative you are of them. Unfortunately, in the current economy, employers are worried that rewarding employees will cost a fortune.

Good news—there are many low-cost ways to reward your employees.

Steps to Take
The first thing you want to do if you’d like to reward your employees is to identify your priorities in terms of your business’ objectives in order to determine how much you are willing to spend and how much you’re willing to attribute to different areas, such as business services.

For example, if you’re spending a lot of company resources and money on achieving increased revenue, then an employee reward and recognition program should reward people who are going toward that specific business goal and that area should, therefore, have more money allotted to it than something that’s a lesser focus for the company. This is just one way to look at how to allot funds toward rewarding employees.

Now in terms of the actual employee reward and recognition program, there are lots of things you can do that are very low-cost. I tend to break them down into 3 categories—awards, recognition and perks. Here are some low-cost ideas for each.

Awards
Awards are basically just tokens of appreciation or can also be given for specific things, such as meeting a sales goal or for handling the most customer calls in one day, etc. Here are a couple ideas to get you started:

• Engraved plaques, which you can get relatively cheap
• Coffee mug with your company name/logo on it

These items are good awards because they can be purchased in bulk, which makes them more affordable.

Recognition
Recognizing employees is one of the most low-cost ways to reward them. Since everyone likes to be recognized for something they did, and recognition is very, very affordable, you’ll be able to recognize employees on a continual basis. Here are a couple ideas:

• Take a picture of the employee who is being recognized and post it on the company intranet or Web site
• Write a profile of the employee to go along with the picture and post it on the intranet, Web site or publish it in your company’s newsletter
• If possible, get your local newspaper to run an article on the employee or a group of employees who accomplished something great at your company

Publicizing a job well-done to the community, as well as internally, just adds to the recognition.

Rewards
There are many ways to reward employees that don’t cost anything more than a few dollars or that only cost time. Here are some ideas:

• Give employees the afternoon off—I’ve found that this is a very good way to reward employees, and it doesn’t have to be an entire day. Just let them leave two hours early one Friday afternoon so they can start their weekend sooner or so they can take care of personal business or go home and take a nap or hang out with their children.
• Get them out of the office—Gather everyone together and do an office-outing, such as going bowling or to the zoo. This wouldn’t cost more than renting a few lanes and bowling shoes or purchasing tickets to the zoo and, of course, time spent away from the office. This type of reward is also a great way to be social, relax, build team spirit and for employees to get to know each other better.
• Bring in a chair massage therapist for the day and let employees take turns getting massages, if they want to. You can usually set this up through a local chiropractic or massage therapist’s office. This is a great way to help out a local business, and many of them will come in for cheap or sometimes for free if they see it as an opportunity to get the word out about their business and are able to hand out business cards or discount certificates to your employees, who might then refer their friends and family to the business.
• Bring in food—Food is a very popular, and delicious, way to reward employees. You can do ice cream sundaes or donuts and cider or have a popcorn afternoon.

Perks
This category would require singling out individuals or a group of individuals for a job well-done and giving them a special privilege. If you do this on an ongoing basis, employees will keep it in their minds as they work, and it may even push them to work harder to try and earn the special perk. Here are some ideas:

• Assigned parking—You could give out assigned parking spaces, which would last for a specific period of time. For example, if you choose an “employee of the month,” you could then give that employee an assigned parking space until the next employee of the month is chosen.
• Lunch with the boss—You could take an employee or a group of employees to lunch as a thank you for doing such a good job. An additional perk would be allowing the employee to choose the restaurant or allowing the group to vote on the restaurant they want to eat at.
• Priority vacation scheduling—You could allow the employee receiving the recognition to be the first person to schedule their vacation for the holiday season or in the summer time, and then have the rest of the employees work their vacation time around them.

These are obviously just some of the infinite number of ideas for rewarding employees. If you get a little creative, you’ll see there are lots of low-cost ideas for rewarding employees that would mean a lot to them.

Written/Created by: Christine Campbell

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