GiftCard Partners Blog

Safety incentive programs can be hard to design and even harder to implement. They should be designed to encourage teamwork, discourage non-reporting of incidents and obviously encourage safe behavior. The biggest obstacle employers face in implementing safety incentive programs is to make them a seamlessly integrated part of the employee culture, not a feared element. Here are three suggestions that will enhance any safety incentive program.

Every office has something annoying or broken in it that has the potential to drive employees crazy and reduce productivity. It seems like small deficiencies in the office environment shouldn't reduce productivity, but you would be surprised at how much the little things about an office environment that can reduce employee motivation and productivity. Office quirks are alright, but office deficiencies can be disruptive. A new survey from
Expert Market detailed the top 10 most annoying office deficiencies, here are our top 3.

At a large company like PwC it is a constant struggle to establish employee purpose. Employees don't want to feel like a cog in the wheel on the road to nowhere. They want to see their impact and want to have purpose in their job, whether they are in an executive management meeting or filing papers in the mailroom.
So how do employers work to establish purpose at work? Here are a few ideas that came from
PwC's recent summit on social purpose that could have a positive impact on an organization, large or small.

Employee motivation can mean a lot of different things and come in a lot of different forms. It means your employees are excited to come to work every day and do their best to make the organization as successful as possible. Employee motivation can also get so granular that at the most basic level employee goals are in line with organization targets. I'm not talking about employee 6 month goals that go on review forms, I mean that their long term goals match the long term targets of their organization. Here are two unique ways to align employee goals with organizational targets to improve the overall harmony of employees' work life balance and workplace motivation.

New research from
Mercer LLC shows a 3% increase in use of carrot style rewards in the context of health and wellness programs. These health and wellness rewards are largely tied to employees' achieving a certain change or reaching a certain biometric range for preventable conditions like obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, etc. According to the research, 23% of large employers are using positive reinforcements as health and wellness rewards.
A Towers Watson study from September also indicates an increase in outcome-based health and wellness rewards, with 18% using them currently and 10% planning to add programs in 2015. While some health and wellness industry professionals believe the days of spot rewards are over, in favor of an organizational shift towards discounting insurance costs, this shift is only being observed by larger firms. While smaller businesses cannot absorb the financial impact of larger policy discounts, spot rewards offer an alternative with the potential to scale up or add larger rewards at a later date. The increased use of health and wellness rewards at a variety of levels, from small spot rewards like
gift cards to large discounts on health insurance, signals a larger trend. Health and wellness programs and health and wellness rewards are becoming a mainstream, integral part of the way benefits and healthcare are delivered from employers to employees. Health and wellness rewards has become a mechanism for employers to make healthcare more affordable for employees, while also ensuring their workforce is healthy and productive, and healthcare is also affordable at the organizational level.
For more information on health and wellness rewards and how they are being used, head over to BusinessInsurance.com.