GiftCard Partners Blog

Everyone likes cash, but as a performance reward, it is impersonal and predictable. Giving employees personalized rewards can help your organization retain happy employees who know their organization cares about them and their individual interests. Richard Rosenblatt, Chairman and CEO at Demand Media goes to extended lengths to ensure his top performing employees receive personal rewards by spending a whole day with employees delivering reward experiences, such as a day with a personal shopper at an upscale department store for employees who like shopping and fashion. Rosenblatt explains the importance of delivering personalized rewards for top contributors because it shows that the organization takes a vested interest in employees, the way employees spend their time and energy investing in the organization they work for. This supportive environment keeps employees happy, satisfied, and contributing to your organization for longer. Reward personalization can be scaled down to a more streamlined system. Gift cards can serve as a great alternative to cash rewards, and can provide personalization to employees as well as a "trophy value" that cash bonuses cannot. Providing a choice of a diverse group of retailers for employees to choose their reward, as well as having one physical item to give employees makes gift cards a win/win choice for employee rewards. Being able to provide an AutoZone gift card to the auto enthusiast, and a Cheesecake Factory gift card to the restaurant enthusiast will allow your organization to deliver thoughtful rewards, while streamlining the reward system.

A great company can’t be great without great talent. Take a brand new shiny sports car for comparison. Without key factors like high performance or hard workers and a sleek profile or thoughtful leaders; your shiny sports car or successful business isn't getting enough mileage. So how do you ensure that your ‘key factors’ or top talent won’t leave your company? Well it always mean you have to add another ZERO to the end of their paycheck. Most employees are simply looking for a little recognition, appreciation, challenge or leadership from their employers.
Forbes interviewed a number of employees and got some pretty interesting feedback:

We use disease related terms to communicate how things, whether it is is the next pop hit, or the flu travel through our networks. As we begin to understand the importance and the value of networks within organizations, we begin to understand how organizations can capitalize on how employees interact, and what the quality of those interactions is. Employers and organizations always want to spread innovation. That is what drives any business forward, and keeps employees engaged and satisfied with their jobs. Organizationally, the biggest challenges can be how to figure out how to pass innovation virally, both up and down hierarchies and across teams. It has been proven by Nicholas Christakis, a medical school professor at Harvard, and his team, that high value employees have wide networks within their organizations and when they find an innovative idea or process they spread it both within their working unit, and across the organization. While some employees would want to hide innovation, in order to claim all of their glory of finding it their own, high value employees seek out different points of view within the organization to test their idea and gain criticism to hone their idea and further innovate to make it better. This philosophy uses the same principles of the virality of that pop song, or the way we all seem to be catching the flu this time of year, and applies it to ideal scenarios within an organization. The promotion of these philosophies can be extremely cost effective within your organization. There is no need to invest a lot in this. Promoting viral innovation can be applied by workshops, or "innovation days" in which employees can be put into teams or introduced to other people within the organization that they do not normally work with. Organizations could even award a small prize for the "innovation day" group that came up with the best idea, incenting employees to better the organization, as they expand their network. Providing a new work environment for a short time-frame allows employees to think differently and expand their networks, making them more valuable to your organization.
For more information on Nicholas Christakis' theory on viral innovation check out this article from FastCompany.

During this time of year employees are looking to maintain their New Year's Resolutions and it’s the perfect opportunity to implement an employee health and wellness program, saving your organization money for the rest of the year. A study cited by 
wellnessproposals.com showed that implementing a wellness program lowered sick leave by 28%, lowered the use of healthcare benefits by 26%, and lowered employee’s compensation claims by 30%. All of these indicators save your organization money, whether it means a smaller, more productive workforce, lower healthcare costs, or lower employee disability and compensation claims. Organizations that implement wellness programs also reduce personnel turnover costs because employees are healthier, happier, and feel supported by their employer which increases productivity and loyalty. Employee health and wellness programs can be very simple to implement. Using a carrot reward philosophy to incent employees to reach health goals, such as quitting smoking, losing a certain amount of weight, or lowering another disease indicating health metric such as blood pressure or cholesterol, is a great way to start. You can even set up inter-office competition for willing employees, allowing employees to compete to reach goals faster, and rewarding the winners. Rewards do not need to be large expensive gifts, rather they can be small rewards that show employees you care without burning all of your organization's newly saved capital. Small denomination gift cards that help employees improve health, such as gift cards to retailers like 
NutriSystem, 
GNC, or 
CVS/Pharmacy can be a great way to reward employees by helping them on their journey while helping your company's bottom line.