GiftCard Partners Blog

Casual Fridays are nice, free snacks are great, beer cards on Fridays, awesome. However, giving employees work perks that save them money and time aren't always good enough when the goal is raising employee loyalty. Here are a few unique work perks that are a great was to push your loyalty program over the top and keep your employees sticking around for the long-term.

Effective employee leadership can be difficult for any management team, and leadership tactics can vary greatly based on the size of your organization and your company culture. However, some principles of effective employee leadership can be universal and really speak to the way you handle your organizational affairs from the perspective of your employees. Here are four tips to instill employee confidence through effective employee leadership.

Motivate your employees by showing them that they are a connected, critical part of your organization. Connecting employees to the core of the organization builds loyalty among employees and builds rapport between your workforce and your end customers. Here are a few ways to motivate employees to ensure your customers stick around for years to come:

Initial engagement in employee health and wellness programs doesn't always drive long term participation like healthy employee cultures. While new employee health and wellness programs often drive short term engagement through the first few months, or maybe even the first few years, creating healthy employee champions and a culture of wellness is what creates long term employee participation. Providing non-cash rewards as a component to a healthy employee culture is a great way to drive long term participation. One example of this was offering a discount in the employee portion of the health insurance premium which almost doubled employee participation in
Herman Miller Co's employee wellness program; jumping from 40% to 79% year over year for the first 3 years, but seeing a plateau in participation levels in subsequent years. Offering small denomination gift cards to retailers like GNC, Nutrisystem and CVS/Pharmacy are another way to promote a healthy employee culture by assisting employees in forming a healthy lifestyle. Instead of using typical carrot tactics to get employees to change habits, providing an environment for creating a healthy employee culture will provide longer term results that will have a greater impact on your workforce and healthcare costs.

This topic is really exciting for us at GiftCard Partners. In the past we've reference the growing popularity of non-cash incentives in the marketplace, highlighting statistics from the 2013 study from
Incentive Federation Inc. and
Aspect Market Intelligence's
Incentive Market Study. The 2013 study touched on the popularity of non-cash incentives, stating that 74% of businesses use non-cash options to recognize and reward key audiences in the form of incentive travel, merchandise, or 
gift cards. Now 
new research by the
Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) and Aspect Market Intelligence, conducted for the
Incentive Gift Card Council,  is showing how non-cash incentives (specifically gift cards) are still hot, hot, hot. The study highlights the continued preference for gift cards in a variety of programs, with the largest companies using them at a rate of 56%. So what are these gift cards being used for? Of the companies using gift cards, 67% are using them for employee incentives, 38% for sales incentives, 30% for customer rewards, and 8% are allocated to channel incentives. As gift cards continue to be a staple for rewards and incentives, with goals to foster motivation or drive engagement, acquisition, retention or loyalty, it's safe to say they're here to stay. Does your company use gift cards in any of their programs? If so, we'd love to here more about how. And if you're looking to add gift cards to your programs check out our gift card brands
here.