The Rewards Continuum!!

What kind of Rewards work best to drive employee engagement and motivate employees?

A colleague of mine “Jay Whitehead” (jaywhitehead@rideau.com) and I were recently at a client meeting, when the client asked “What kind of Rewards work best to drive employee engagement and motivate employees”? Jay answered the question very well and I thought his response will be useful to a lot of us. His response was the following:

Rewards work in a continuum. At one extreme, you have an investment banker working in Wall Street with 6 figure salaries - For him/her, merchandise awards, cash awards are nice, but not very significant. They crave for the softer Recognition – someone saying “Thank You” to them, getting a $20 plaque in front of the company employees, getting an email from the CEO congratulating him/her for a good job done etc. The Recognition for them is less dependent on the product/merchandise as it has very little value for them.

At the other end of the continuum, you can have a call center worker in India earning $300 per month, has a lot of unsatisfied basic needs and aspirations for a better life. So for them, dinner vouchers, household goods as awards, cash awards etc. mean a lot. Any recognition done without a product/material will be trivialized by them – e.g. an email from the CEO is nice, but I would love to get a TV from the company for the contributions I have made. For them the recognition experience must be matched with an appropriate product – the bigger the recognition, bigger the award value they inherently expect.

In between these 2 extremes, the balance between the recognition and the reward product changes in a linear manner.

So when you are looking at creating a Recognition program, you may want to design the mix between the recognition and the actual reward along this continuum. In most companies, this would mean that for the lower level/junior employees, merchandise/reward products would play a very important role and for the senior employees, the recognition experience would play a more critical role. This does not mean that we have no reward products for the senior employees, and no recognition experience for the junior employees. It is really about the balance between the two.