GiftCard Partners Blog

Maintaining an engaged workforce is top of mind for many employers in today’s competitive job market. Implementing effective employee reward and incentive programs with gift cards is a flexible, easy way to keep employees happy and provide positive reinforcement that fits any budget. When selecting the gift cards to use in your program you can select either prepaid cards or branded gift cards. Prepaid cards are retailer agnostic and come primarily from VISA^® and Mastercard^® while branded gift cards are usable at one specific retailer. Both products offer flexibility, easy delivery and convenience for program administrators and program participants alike.

As Americans get used to the next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, what is to become of the way we work? We are over 2 years into a world of remote, hybrid and flexible work, and workforce trends indicate that this is the way work will be for the foreseeable future. Workforces of all kinds have proven that they can do their jobs remotely, that productivity doesn’t suffer, and that employee experience improves. As employees are challenged with communicating, and staying motivated working remotely, employers need to adapt employee engagement programs to address these new conditions.

Employee engagement programs are more important now than ever in order to boost morale, facilitate open communication, and maintain motivation within your newly remote organization.

Based on our experience of being a remote organization for almost 20 years, we’ve identified several successful strategies to implement as you adapt your employee engagement program for a remote workforce.

Employee Happiness Survey News Flash:

Employee rewards don’t always make employees happy.

Want to know the number one reason? Because their jobs aren’t their whole life. If their friends, family, and health aren’t intact, chances are no reward or recognition at work is going to turn it around for them. Ensuring that employee rewards are timed correctly to fit an employee’s circumstances is key. According to the latest Employee Happiness Survey from Blackhawk Engagement Solutions, work ranks 8th among the 12 factors that make up employee happiness…not 1st, 2nd, or even 3rd, but 8th…almost the bottom third of employee priorities. So before you reward an employee and think it is going to impact their whole demeanor, make sure you set internal expectations appropriately.

We are two weeks away from the 2014 All Payments Expo that will take place at The Mirage in Las Vegas this year. As regular attendees of the event, the GiftCard Partners team is looking forward to seeing both new and returning faces in the payments industry and speaking with new loyalty, incentive and payment companies who can use gift cards as part of their reward complement. The APEX brings together Alternative Financial Services, Emerging Payments, Omnichannel Retail Strategies and Prepaid all in one location to focus on areas of growth and convergence in payments. Check out more on the APEX
here.

A great post from Prepaid Expo; they outline some interesting financial prepaid stats, usages, mobile stats  and more. Interesting information about the decline in use of cash; this is a fact that employers can keep in mind when planning employee incentives and rewards. Prepaid and gift cards aren’t just as good as cash…they ARE cash and loaded on mobile devices, they are the cash of the future! Here are the tidbits most interesting to us, click below for the whole shebang: - $82 billion. That's the amount expected to be loaded onto Prepaid cards in 2012. - Consumers are using prepaid cards as a way to access wages, direct deposits increased by nearly 70% in 2011. - Mobile POS payments is expected to grow from $362.6 million in 2011 to $1.4 billion in 2017. - The use of cash is predicted to decline 3% a year until 2015, through 2015, the use of cash will decline by nearly $200 billion. - Cash point-of-sale purchases is expected to drop to 23% by 2017.
More interesting stats from Prepaid Expo