Last updated: 3 June 2024
Empowering your team should be a top priority if you’re a business leader who wants to get more from employees. When folks feel empowered, they’re far more likely to take proactive, positive steps to improve the business and enhance their own productivity.
Leading an engaged workforce can reduce labor costs by minimizing employee turnover, too. This is crucial if you run a business with tight profit margins and can’t afford to spend thousands on recruiting and hiring every year.
Offering employee incentive programs can meaningfully boost employee empowerment and may be the key to heightened productivity in the future. That’s because incentives help folks drive performance — even when folks are low on energy. The right incentives can boost morale, too, as they’ll improve your efforts to recognize the hard work of your top-performing staff.
Benefits of Incentive Programs
At their core, incentive programs are designed to channel behavior toward targeted outcomes. For example, you may reward your sales team with time off if they hit their targets early or you may provide monetary bonuses to staff members who play a pivotal role in successful projects. This can be deeply motivating and may increase your team’s efforts over a sustained period.
Additional benefits of incentive programs include:
- Job Satisfaction: Put simply, folks prefer to work in environments where they feel valued and are rewarded. Even small rewards, like offering remote work once a project wraps, can make a world of difference.
- Improved Tracking: Offering incentives means you need to measure productivity properly. This can improve your understanding of people’s performance and better measure their contributions.
- Better Evaluations: Improved tracking gives you a chance to evaluate performance and will come in handy during quarterly reviews. These insights can also help you set collaborative SMART goals with your team that will empower them for the weeks and months to come.
- Reduced Turnover: Employees who feel recognized are far less likely to leave than those who feel their efforts are disregarded. By providing incentives, you bolster performance and are given a great opportunity to recognize the efforts of your team.
Clearly, well-structured incentive programs empower your employees and help them achieve peak productivity. They also aid your efforts as a leader, as you’ll have to quantify performance metrics if you want to give out rewards in a timely manner. This can play a pivotal role in your recognition schemes and may enhance engagement and empowerment at work. However, before you start setting lofty targets that come with great rewards, consider the impact that your incentives may have on stress management.
Managing Stress
Every good leader knows that stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When leveraged correctly, stress can focus your team’s efforts and help folks push themselves to reach their potential. This can help drive performance and will help your employees prioritize the most important parts of their job. This means that providing a little stress in the form of a challenging target can actually help you get more from your team.
However, if you create targets that are unrealistic and difficult to achieve, you may find that employees take on chronic stress instead. This is a real issue, as, according to the American Psychological Association, chronic stress may lead to issues like:
- Fatigue
- Depression
- Headaches and musculoskeletal pain
- Increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and diabetes
Failing to properly implement a responsible incentive program can be particularly damaging if you work in a high-risk industry. Chronic stress undermines workplace safety by:
- Increasing the risk of accident and injury
- Distracting employees from their work
- Weakening decision-making skills
- Causing conflict that may detract from communication
Clearly, incentives that inadvertently increase stress are bad for the overall health, well-being, and productivity of your employees. This means you must take a considered approach when setting KPIs and ensure that the goals you use to manage incentives follow the SMART method of goal setting.
Re-Engaging Your Team
Re-engaging lazy employees can be tricky if you’ve recently inherited a new team or are attempting to create a culture change within a firm. Incentives can play a crucial role in capturing the attention of these staff members and giving them a clearer sense of direction.
If you notice that some employees regularly fail to meet their goals and miss out on incentives, consider setting aside time to figure out why they fell short. This may reveal inadequacies that are not their fault, including:
- A lack of proper training
- Poor understanding of goals
- Inadequate feedback
- A misalignment of skills
- Substandard workflow management
Paying attention to folks who do not qualify for incentives is crucial to your overall empowerment efforts. Doing so will reveal shortcomings amongst your staff and help you spark a period of long-term growth in the business. This can improve employee loyalty, drastically enhance engagement, and ensure that all employees feel valued in the workplace.
Conclusion
Incentives are a powerful tool if you’re leading a high-performance team. The right incentives can capture the attention of your staff and will innately boost their productivity. However, before you roll out a series of targets and tempting rewards, ensure that your goals will not place undue stress on your team. This will help you better manage morale and will give you a chance to re-engage those employees who have lost their way.
