GiftCard Partners Blog

Innovation can be hard to come by, especially during December when everyone is counting down the days until the holiday break. Crowdsourcing ideas is one great way to help get the innovative juices flowing and build camaraderie among colleagues. Here are 3 ways to cultivate and maintain your team's efforts:
Be Realistic: Identify key organizational challenges and use team competitions like a "hackathon" or a full team brainstorming day to allow employees to innovate and overcome the key challenges for the organization. This gives employees ownership of their company and the competition gives the employer solutions to major issues within their organization.
Provide Basic Training: Instead of giving your employees the proverbial fish, teach them to fish. Provide enough comprehensive training to let employees' minds run free to create constructive and innovative solutions to problems.
Be Specific: Frame employee innovation competitions around specific initiatives. Trying to solve one problem at a time focuses employee innovations and allows thoughts and ideas to be more creative. Focused initiatives also make problems seem more realistic to solve. Employee innovation can be a powerful tool to transform your business externally and internally.
For more ideas on how to cultivate employee innovation check out this article from Inc.com.

Employees can be your greatest advocate or a horrible detriment to your customer interactions. They are face of your brand, and can create exceptional customer experiences that last in the minds of your customers or they can create bad experiences that leave a horrible bad taste in your consumers' mouths. Here are 3 ways that, when motivated, your employees can
positively affect your bottom line.

Surprisingly, we've found that fixed pay (salary) and individual performance pay have little affect on innovation, while variable group pay and indirect pay (employee benefits) have a much stronger impact.

Employee loyalty is harder and harder to come by these days. And it has been for a while. There's no such thing as working at the same place for 30-40 years and retiring with a pension anymore. So how can employers keep employees engaged and hungry for more within their current company?
You reward them. However, the rewards are no longer for longevity. No 5, 10 or 20 years of service luncheons. Since employee loyalty is no longer a motivator, with the average junior employee holding a single position for only an average of 18 months, it's time to evolve past employee loyalty.
Identifying desired behavior and rewarding execution and consistency is the new "loyalty." You can't help that careers are ever-shifting and people get restless (which is more encouraging in today's job market). So worry about what you can control. Make your employees the best they can be, and when they are, reward them for it. Use what is beyond loyalty, short term performance, to motivate your staff toward organizational goals. Employee loyalty doesn't need to be paramount to run a team full of people working well together towards a common goal. If longevity isn't in your organization's 2015 outlook, don't panic. Just find employee motivators you can control and look to performance, even short term, to reward employees for good work.