Your New Year resolutions for employee engagement

It’s a bright New Year – and you are no doubt chomping at the bit to get back to some work! Well, maybe.

If you’ve decided to make this year accountable, with some fierce business goals and some drastic changes, it’s never been a better time to enhance your employee incentives.

When the stakes are this high – you need to make the right choices. Whether you’re focused on small improvements, welling, reward or recognition, here are our ideas for the employee incentives that are going to give you the best bang for your buck.

Your Goal: Improving your working environment

The tinsel has gone, the festive chocs consumed. If your working environment is tired, you should invest. It seems unnatural, especially if your business model is built on the receipt of revenue before you invest. However, studies and common sense shows that the working environment will have a huge impact on the sense of well being.

Tips

Potplants can improve mood and productivity – consider one every 5 metres.

A desk reshuffle is a good excuse for a deep clean and can increase conversation across the workplace. New relationships = new ideas

A professional window cleaner should be hired or increased in frequency.

Encourage an ‘away from your desk for lunch’ policy – at least once a week.

Consider a music system that allows music to be played within the office to a set station (don’t forget your licence)

Your Goal: To try a travel incentive

If the idea of running a travel incentive has seemed like something that involves passports, battling with an airline and cancelling hotels in the Med, relax. There are travel incentive agencies on hand who specialize in travel for business, so it can all be handled for you. Whatever margins you make, there is always room for a target that is high enough to warrant a budget to be portioned towards travel incentives. What could be more memorable? Here are some ideas.

Use a travel voucher. You decide the value and they hold a record of your incentive vouchers. Your team members then call the agency with the voucher numbers and we will validate the holder and the voucher number before it is used. The incentive voucher can then be used in part payment towards a trip. This prevents the issues of booking trips, passports and any employees who move on.

Look for a travel incentive agency who are ABTA/ ATOL bonded and also independent. This will allow them to use and choose from a huge array of suppliers.

Your Goal: Improve Well-being and Reduce Absence

If you work in a business that suffers from poor well-being, health issues or recurrent illness/ absence, start quickly! The benefits of a healthy workplace are not only seen in the key individuals / repeat offenders, but across the business as a whole.

Look to get a corporate rate for a gym or a health club. Of course, January is the ideal time to negotiate a deal!

Encourage ‘Out of office’ breaks and purchase pedometers to track steps against a target. (10,000 a day is the recommended amount.)

Look at food boxes for fruit and veg delivered to your office weekly. Abel and Cole offer a range of boxes.

Install hand sanitizer ports throughout the building and signs encouraging hand washing.

Remove handles from doors and use a push pad instead, again teaming this with a sanitizer port.

Your Goal: Invest in Training and Development

Learning, training and development are all things that, if a rewards or HR professional is not careful, can slip off the radar.

Here are some tips.

Invest in an automated system that takes out the paper of the whole process of understanding and benchmarking. BambooHR is a good option, but there are plenty of available systems that tie in emails, annual leave plans and company updates to make keeping a track of development simple.

Hold employees accountable and change the internal conversation to ‘when is my one to one’ towards a culture of ‘I would like to book in my next development meeting’. Explicitly tell employees they should meet with a manager to discuss their goals and plans.

Use leaderboard software. If you have ever wanted a visible leaderboard, don’t aim for utopia and stop short of doing anything. Take a look at some of the ready made system and see if this small investment improves.

What are your tips for the new year? And spread the knowledge!