Remember the wind chime, the umbrella, the party, snacks and bonus check in our last post?

Well during the corporate foray of employee rewards and recognition efforts, everyone in the department, regardless of their level of involvement in the project, got the wind chime and the umbrella and the party and the snacks and, yes, the bonus check.

In addition to the one size fits all approach whether earned or not, although an umbrella at some point is going to come in handy, and the wind chimes do actually still hang in my backyard almost ten years later, no one asked me, or anyone else if we particularly wanted any of it or we might have preferred say a rain jacket or maybe a decorative flag.

You see, one of the main tricks of employers who do the employee engagement game well know that perks and benefits should be personalized, fitting with each individual’s motivational preferences based on their personalities, interests and place in life.

As The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Todaystates,

“Rather than a standard package of health, wealth, and paid time off, companies can provide employees with a budget and a widely diverse set of options. These can range from sponsoring paid community service time overseas to allowing for credits to buy a hybrid car or even financially supporting an increased personal skill, such as learning a new language. The options are endless.”

So if you want to focus on making it personal, here are three steps:

1. Ask.  Ask and ask often what employees want.   You need to do this in aggregate and individually.  We suggest you design a survey to ask employees what they want and value in order to design overall benefit package options and structure. However, each person should be asked individually by their manager what things actually motivate them and what situations they are experiencing in their life and in work that cause one thing to be more motivational over another. For a list of motivational factors we use, email us and we’ll send you a copy.

2. Create.  Create a package of program options based on survey results of what people want inline with what is fitting with your organization’s budget.   The above quote goes on to say, “How to fund this? In one survey, Millennials indicated that they are willing to make trade-offs in terms of base salary in order to have a job that fits with their values.”

In addition, some of the benefits/perks you see people want may cost little to nothing such as flexible work schedules and the ability to work remotely.  These options in many cases have been shown to increase the bottom-line through productivity instead of decrease it.

3. Evaluate.   Evaluate if your program is working to drive employee engagement.  We recommend usingGallup’s 12 engagement questions for this.  Regardless of the mechanism you use to measure employee engagement, these results should be positively correlated with desirable overall business results such as increased profits that every organization tracks.   More on these business results that should be seen in next week’s post…

Are your rewards and benefits personalized?  If so, what positive results have you seen?

If you like this post, you may also like:

The Best Way to Thank Employees is to Make it Personal

Want to keep great employees? Know how to compensate them.