Planning on providing an incentive scheme for your team but don’t know where to start? Follow these four simple guidelines to get you on the way:

No.1 Alignment

Firstly, think of your company’s vision and strategies are and how this has been communicated to your employees both in-house and publicly. Having these overarching goals linked to your employee’s role makes their part in your company’s short and long term targets explicit. They become an accountable part of the process and can effectively see how their performance affects company achievement.

No.2 Engagement

Incentive schemes are an effective tool in introducing a number of positive behaviours in an organisation, namely improved organisational performance and increased effort from employees. Involving the employee, through effective communication and clarification of their KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), leaves no confusion about what needs to be achieved and if done well can build the foundation for effective communication channels. This, in turn, can then filter through to other aspects of the organisation, for example team culture and staff engagement.

No.3 Achievable

Your incentive scheme should provide a framework for your employee for an agreed time frame, for example one year. Determining the time frame will depend on the job roles involved and the turnaround in results that you want to see and may mean different time scales for different roles. However, it is important that once the measures and timeframe are determined that they are not “tweaked” until the specified end-date or review period.Choosing achievable, yet challenging, measures allows an employee to grow professionally within the organisation, put into practise training and development programmes that the employee has undertaken and show the proven value of said training to the company.
It is also important not to overwhelm the employee with a number of measures – keep to the company’s core strategies. Although there are no hard and fast rules, four KPIs is often a good number and can be easily quantified and understood. Ultimately the choice will be yours.

No.4 Celebrate

Feedback throughout the incentive process is vital. If the employee has achieved the agreed measures this in turn means that company goals and targets have been strengthened, which can have flow-on effects to team culture and staff engagement as well as company profits. Once the employee has reached their KPIs within the set time period it is then time to consider the next set of measures.This will take you back to where your company’s goals are now set and how the employee’s role has changed over this time and the cycle can begin again.

It is important to note that Incentive Schemes are part of a Performance Management System and will require a clear and simple Job Description so the employee accurately understands their role within your company, what is expected from them and what their performance will be measured upon.

Quite often the implementation of incentive schemes can mean an exciting time for the company with expectations of growth and new markets. Stratigence can help you create, inspire and deliver your company’s goals – give us a call!