GiftCard Partners Blog

Great bosses lead to happy, content, motivated employees. When employees feel like their boss is investing in them they are much more likely to invest more of themselves into their work, which reflects positively on the business, and the office environment. Here are 5 qualities of a remarkable boss, and how it can help your business and employee productivity.
1. Develop every employee: Provide the training, mentoring and opportunities to allow your employees to develop and grow in their roles. Implementing goal oriented incentive programs that provide rewards such as gift cards, or extra time off is a great way to provide growth opportunities while providing added incentive for employees and staying within the employer's budget.

2. Deal with problems immediately: Ignoring problems can kill team morale. Addressing problems and changing processes internally in a timely manner can be difficult and time consuming but it maintains a positive, focused atmosphere in the office, free of politics and distractions.

3. Rescue your worst employee: Work with the "weak link" on your team to try to rehabilitate their image to the rest of the team by stepping up the coaching and mentoring you provide.
4. Serve others, not yourself: Putting yourself second to your employees and acting selflessly goes a long way in your role as the supervisor. It instills greater confidence in employees and reinforces their support system within the organization which will directly increase their productivity and motivation.

5. Always remember where you came from: Spend time with your employees when presented the opportunity. Spending small moments with employees provides a unique opportunity to inspire, reassure, motivate, and even give someone hope for their professional future. The higher your station in the company the greater your responsibility is to spend time with more junior employees.  
For more information on becoming a great boss and how to inspire your employees check out the Inc. article.

The Incentive Research Foundation released an executive briefing entitled 
2012 Trends in Rewards and Recognition, which shows emerging trends for 2012. Some of the top trends include:

According to Gartner Inc., of Stamford, CT 70% of the top 2,000 publicly held companies will use game-like applications to engage and reward their employees by 2014. Gamification is changing the employee engagement and rewards landscape. Gamifying employee rewards falls in line with social media and the concept of social sharing to create brand awareness and positive brand image. Whether applications are used internally, based on employee performance or externally, rewarding employees for promoting the company and bringing in referral traffic, the trend is growing. Gamification can reward employees in a number of ways. Some applications are designed for employees to accrue points for larger rewards, but others reward employees more frequently with smaller rewards such as gift cards to a choice of retialers, allowing the employee to essentially choose their own gift. The combination of the social component of game-like applications and the rewards employees work toward through the use of the applications makes gamifying employee engagement productive for both the employer and employee.  
For more information on gamification and to check out some existing examples check out this article in "Entrepreneur."

For many employers, making the connection between “games” at work and increased productivity can be a tough leap to make. But evidence of the success of gamification increasingly piles up and now there are many corporate success trends we can point to. Yet, the term “gamification” and the motivation technique is becoming a cornerstone of corporate and employee incentive programs. Snowfly, an employee recognition and incentive company reports over 2,700,000 hits on Google for the term, over 150 million of their corporate performance games have been played, and they expect gamification to be a 2.8 billion dollar business by 2015.1 In
Snowfly’s 16 Key Findings for Success white paper, they tout that their workplace games have a 93% participant approval rate within incentive and employee performance programs, yet the national approval average for traditional programs hovers around 45%.2 Many more key discoveries and lessons learned can be found in the
white paper. In
Incentive Research Foundation’s (IRF) recent top trends webinar, they list gamification as #4 out of their
12 Trends in Rewards and Recognition for 2012. IRF white paper outlines Gartner Group’s prediction “that by 2015, half of all managed innovation processes will include game mechanics, and that by 2014, 70% of all the Global 2000 organizations will have at least one “gamified application” in place.3 The future seems quite bright for this innovative interactive method of motivating, incenting, and rewarding. Are you using such techniques yet? Sources: 1 & 2:
Gamification after Twelve Years and 150 Million Games: 16 Key Findings for Success 3:
IRF Trends &
Gartner’s report: Gartner Says By 2015, More Than 50 Percent of Organizations That Manage Innovation Processes Will Gamify Those Processes

Rewarding employees can become trite and lose its meaning. Sometimes coming up with interesting ways to recognize exceptional employees like presenting a public reward or giving an innovative gift such as a gift card, instead of cash can make the reward more meaningful. Here are a few quick criteria for keeping meaning in your employee rewards program.