GiftCard Partners Blog

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.

Mobile recognition, Social, Interactive, Green…there are many key initiatives rolled up in Roy Saunderson’s Top 10 Trends for Employee Recognition in 2013, but he shows us that it’s not just important to identify the trends, but to also put them in context. It’s not surprising to see gift cards rank in top recognition trends for the new year, but Roy shares his insights around making recognition and incentives meaningful for the employee.
“6. Give me the cards I want." Employees will no longer be satisfied with mainstay gift cards from big box stores and established suppliers. Employees will demand to receive customized cards from meaningful places they prefer and not just what the employer deems everyone should get.” This bodes well for GCP’s strategy of bringing the most wanted gift card brands to employers for recognition rewards and incentives. It forces employers to not just toss a cash equivalent gift card at an employee, but to be thoughtful about the gift. Give gift cards to great restaurants so your employees take their families to dinner, pharmacy gift cards so families can be proactive with healthful and personal care purchases, retail apparel gift cards…often a real treat.
Check out the rest of Incentive’s Top 10 Trends for Employee Recognition in 2013

Customer Relationship Management systems are vital to an organization's success. It is how the sales and services teams manage clients and prospects, without whom no company would exist. Some may even so far as to say the CRM system is the lifeblood of the company, with its maintenance being crucial to success, even if it is not a main responsibility. However, many employees are too busy and unmotivated to maintain a current CRM database. The maintenance work is tedious and time consuming and most employees push it off for a slow day that may not come for months. Gamifying your CRM system could be the solution to motivating employees to keep the CRM database as current as possible. Offering point systems that keep track of work done within the CRM system, which employees can then redeem for rewards creates friendly competition among co-workers and real life incentive for employees to get their work done as efficiently and effectively as possible. Offering flexible rewards such as gift cards to a diverse array of retailers such as
The Limited,
The Children's Place,
Boston Market and
NutriSystem gives employees an opportunity to choose from a reward that is valuable for them. Redeeming gamification points, in addition to trying to out play (or work!) colleagues will create healthy competition, increased productivity, and a motivated workforce that is happy to do even the most mundane tasks.

We’re finding that people are still questioning why companies across the U.S. are spending $22.7 BILLION
¹ on gift cards and what this segment of the B2B gift card market is all about. AND we’re also finding that corporations and companies of all sizes are STILL surprised to learn that there are savings to be had on gift card incentive BULK purchases for motivation, incentives, and rewards.  Why are 52% of U.S. businesses using gift cards to recognize and reward employees, sales folk, partners and customers.
² Check out GCP’s new Customers and their Programs page on our website for
B2B Gift Card Incentives Defined. Want to dig deeper into how gift cards are utilized in the workplace to motivate, incent, and reward? Download our
Incentives in the Workplace eBook. 1 & 2 Source: IRF Market Study: B2B Gift Cards