How To Reward Employees

Motivation is intimately connected with the way an individual sees the work process and the social relations happening around him. We now know that the complexity of relations established by an individual has more cognitive factors than thought in the past decades, a process caused by the evolution of the work profile in modern organizations.

The object in this article is to establish five critical rules for motivational incentive, whether its object is a group of employees or a single individual.

Throughout this article I will use the term 'collaborator' to indicate a person who is involved (whether directly or not) in a working process and under an established chain of command. By assuming that employees are a sub-group inside this collaborator perspective, we can widen the use and practicality of these key points and achieve a more advanced framework.

The main objective of this premise is to allow the reader to build a bridge that transcends the usual work relations to a deeper understanding of how motivational strategies can be used towards not only employees but also other groups as well.

1. Know the potential of your collaborator. A curriculum vitae is not enough to demonstrate all the qualifications of an individual. To know your collaborator, you must evaluate their risk aversion, their capacity to manage conflicts, their proactivity towards the established goals, their capacity to handle issues with responsibility, and their tolerance to stress.

   Motivational techniques must be faced as any other investment; they must be made with a clear perception of their return. Knowing the potential of each of your collaborators helps in asserting the opportunity risk involved in this investment and can be a determinant factor for the choice of the incentive to be used.

2. Know your collaborator`s spheres of relationship. To simplify matters, you can think of five main spheres that compose the personal life of an individual. They are: Family, Emotional, Intellectual, Social and Professional. All these spheres together define the characteristics of a person, the professional sphere being only one among several other possibilities to be measured and asserted.

   As individuals, people need incentives that affect several spheres of their personal life. Determine which spheres have needs with higher priorities from your collaborator's point of view. Then rank them according to your availability to fulfill them.

3. Interpret the cultural side involved in motivation. Many executives have motivational problems in their teams because they didn`t identify the influence of culture prior to the choice of the adequate motivational instrument. Some business cultures easily naturally accept incentives with the objective of maintaining balance and a sense of equity among team members. Some business cultures, however, don't respond as fully to incentives based upon performance, and others may believe that working incentives must be based on some combination of performance and need.

4. Know your goal. For every destiny, there is a direction. If the need for the incentive is to reach a new level of excellence in an activity, lay clear and specific goals that can be easily understood and incorporated in your organizational culture. Make it clear that the use of the incentive is a recognition that your team is capable of achieving the objectives set for them.

   Many times, the use of incentives may be required to reward objectives already reached. In this case, it is advised to establish a new set of objectives as terrain for a new opportunity in the future. Clarify that the behavior shown will always be rewarded and that there are already new marks to be aimed at. Remember that every incentive has a life period, and that recognition for performance is one of the most durable incentives you will ever find.

5. Be ready to take action. A well defined motivational strategy can boost productivity exponentially, as long as there is latent potential for growth and development in your working process.

   On the other hand, a failing strategy must be corrected swiftly so that the relations between the individuals in your team are not affected in a way that lowers the level of excellence to somewhere below your starting level. It is an important part of a manager`s job to keep track of and control the execution of any motivational strategy, swiftly intervening whenever there`s a need to make small adjustments towards your motivational goal.