GiftCard Partners Blog

Today, the team at GiftCard Partners is participating in the annual ThinkAThon. The 2014
ThinkAThon brings together big brains from all over the payment industry in a competition to solve some of the area’s most puzzling questions. This year’s problem-solving will focus on finding creative solutions within the following areas:

We rarely do this. Our focus is on B2B gift cards and how employee/employer relationships can be improved through various HR programs. But we have such a compelling example of one of our brands doing right by its customers and promoting loyalty through employers. Here are a few ways Auto Zone is promoting loyalty to its customers and helping employers promote loyalty too:

Employee incentives can be great when offered and given at the right cadence and the right size for the occasion. According to a new study by the  Association for Psychological Science's Minds for Business, people who had been promised a higher reward for completing a task and thus had heightened levels of dopamine in their blood, had more difficulty completing simple tasks. This definitely seems like a long shot with a lot of extrapolating. However, the same theory could apply to employee incentives. If employers offer too much in the way of incentives for employees, employees can be so blindly driven by the incentives that the quality of their work falters because they lose sight of organizational goals and get so focused on the incentives at hand. You can avoid this situation by offering small "spot" rewards that come as a surprise to employees and are not pre-announced. When employees don't expect a reward, they are driven by their goals and company missions, not a reward they never knew was coming. Keep it simple and small to keep your employee incentives effective.
To learn more about the study or how to keep your employee incentives in check, head over to Inc.com.

Integrating employee advocacy and collaboration is a great way to build camaraderie across teams and encourage employees to work together no matter what department they work in or who their boss is. The same goes for departments and areas of your organization. Employee advocacy is extremely effective when working to amplify your marketing program.

Normally work-from-home policies are tight at small and large companies alike. But would a winter like this one be enough to change employers' minds? At GiftCard Partners, we all work from home every day, and while we understand that doesn't work for everyone, here's a compelling case for a work-from-home policy that allows employees flexibility and employers increased productivity. Here's a weather-related take on employees working from home: