From Awareness to Action: How Incentives Increase Employee Participation

But there is an important difference between offering a program and getting employees to participate in it.

That gap matters.

MetLife's 2025 Employee Benefit Trends Study found declines in employee engagement, productivity, and holistic health, while emphasizing the importance of consistently engaging employees throughout the year to help them use available benefits.

Meanwhile, WorldatWork's research shows that Total Rewards leaders are increasingly focused on modernization, employee-centric strategies, better communication, and stronger alignment between rewards and organizational goals. In its 2025 research, better communication and education topped the list of changes Total Rewards leaders wanted to make to their organizations' approach to Total Rewards.

But communication is only part of the equation.

Employees can understand that a program exists and still fail to take action.

That's where targeted incentives can play an important role.

When incentives are connected to specific, meaningful employee actions, Total Rewards teams can move beyond simply communicating programs and begin actively driving participation.

The Total Rewards Challenge: Awareness Doesn't Guarantee Action

Today's Total Rewards strategies can encompass far more than compensation and traditional benefits.

WorldatWork's Total Rewards Inventory includes compensation, recognition, development opportunities, health and welfare benefits, leave, retirement, financial wellness, workplace flexibility, culture initiatives, and other programs designed to support the employee experience.

Employees may be asked to:

• Complete benefits enrollment
• Participate in wellbeing initiatives
• Attend professional development programs
• Complete required or optional training
• Participate in employee surveys
• Reach performance milestones
• Contribute to safety initiatives
• Engage with financial wellness resources
• Participate in recognition programs
• Complete other important workforce activities

Organizations can communicate these opportunities through email, internal portals, manager communications, meetings, newsletters, and other channels.

But ultimately, employees still have to act.

That creates a fundamental question for Total Rewards leaders: How do you turn employee awareness into measurable participation?

Incentives Help Bridge the Gap Between Knowing and Doing

Employees have competing priorities.

An email about an optional financial wellness webinar may be important, but it competes with meetings, deadlines, customer requests, family obligations, and dozens of other demands.

The same is true for training, surveys, wellbeing programs, benefits education, recognition initiatives, and other workforce programs.

Employees may understand the value of participating and still postpone the action. A well-designed incentive creates an additional reason to follow through.

The key is to connect the incentive to a specific desired behavior.

Instead of: "Here's a reward."

The strategy becomes: "Complete this meaningful action, and we'll recognize that participation."

That distinction turns incentives from an employee perk into a tool for encouraging measurable behavior.

Start With the Action, Not the Reward

One of the most important principles in incentive program design is also one of the simplest: Decide what you want employees to do before deciding what you want to give them.

The desired action should drive the incentive strategy.

For example:

This approach gives Total Rewards teams something much more useful than vague engagement.

It gives them an observable action. And observable actions can be measured.

Targeted Incentives Can Make Existing Programs Work Harder

This is where incentives can become especially valuable within a Total Rewards strategy. The objective doesn't necessarily have to be adding another employee program. It can be increasing participation in programs the organization already funds.

Consider an organization that already provides professional development opportunities. The investment has already been made. If employees don't participate, however, the organization may not realize the intended value of that investment.

A targeted incentive could encourage employees to complete a certification, attend a learning session, finish a training series, or reach another defined development milestone.

The same principle applies across Total Rewards.

An organization may already provide financial wellness resources, wellbeing programs, recognition initiatives, learning opportunities, or other benefits.

The incentive becomes a way to help move employees from: "That's available to me."

to: "I'm going to participate."

That is an important shift because it allows Total Rewards teams to focus not simply on how much they offer, but on how effectively employees engage with what is already available.

Recognition and Incentives Should Reinforce Meaningful Behaviors

Rewards can also help reinforce the behaviors organizations want repeated.

Gallup and Workhuman research found that well-recognized employees were 45% less likely to have turned over two years later, demonstrating the potential long-term impact of meaningful recognition.

But effective recognition isn't simply about distributing rewards. Context matters.

Employees should understand:

• What they accomplished
• Why it mattered
• What behavior is being recognized
• How that behavior connects to team or organizational priorities

For example, a generic gift card delivered without explanation may feel like a transaction.

A reward accompanied by a personalized message recognizing an employee for completing a development milestone, contributing an idea, reaching a performance objective, or participating in an important initiative creates a very different experience.

The reward reinforces the action. The message reinforces the meaning.

Together, they can strengthen the connection between Total Rewards and the employee experience.

The Best Incentive Isn't Necessarily the Biggest

More expensive doesn't automatically mean more motivating.

In 2025, the Incentive Research Foundation examined how reward value affects motivation and found that while increasing reward value can improve motivation and participation, there can be a point at which additional spending produces diminishing returns.

That has an important implication for Total Rewards teams.

The goal isn't necessarily to spend more. It's to spend intentionally.

A smaller incentive delivered at the right moment for a clearly defined action may be more strategically useful than a larger reward disconnected from a specific behavior.

IRF research also shows that non-cash reward programs have been moving toward more moderate spending levels. In North America, 62% of programs in its research spent between $100 and $500 per person annually on non-cash rewards, while gift cards represented at least 43% of incentives.

The takeaway isn't that every organization should use the same denomination or budget.

It's that incentive value should be calibrated to the audience, action, program objective, and desired level of participation.

Frequent Reinforcement Can Keep Programs Visible

Many Total Rewards initiatives aren't built around a single annual event.

Employee engagement happens throughout the year.

Development happens throughout the year.

Recognition happens throughout the year.

Wellbeing happens throughout the year.

Performance happens throughout the year.

That makes ongoing reinforcement valuable.

Instead of concentrating all recognition around annual milestones, organizations can identify meaningful moments throughout the employee journey.

For example:

• Completing onboarding
• Finishing training
• Participating in a company initiative
• Achieving a performance milestone
• Completing a wellbeing challenge
• Providing valuable employee feedback
• Reaching a service anniversary
• Demonstrating an organizational value
• Completing benefits-related actions

These smaller moments create opportunities to reinforce behaviors closer to when they happen.

They also help keep Total Rewards visible beyond enrollment season, annual reviews, or year-end recognition.

Personalization Makes the Reward More Relevant

Targeting what employees do is one side of effective incentive design. Personalizing how they're rewarded is another.

Employees aren't interchangeable.

Different generations, income levels, career stages, family situations, interests, locations, and personal priorities can all influence what an employee considers valuable.

That makes a one-size-fits-all reward increasingly difficult to justify.

WorldatWork identified personalized benefits and modular compensation among the major Total Rewards trends shaping 2025 and noted that organizations continued aligning their employee value propositions with workforce expectations around flexibility and personalization.

Non-cash incentives can support this approach by allowing organizations to maintain a consistent program while giving employees flexibility in their reward experience.

Gift cards are particularly well suited to that model because employees can receive something tangible and distinct from compensation while still having meaningful choice.

Choice Doesn't Mean Giving Up Program Control

For Total Rewards teams, personalization has to be balanced with operational consistency.

Organizations still need to consider:

• Budget
• Eligibility
• Program rules
• Reward values
• Timing
• Distribution
• Employee populations
• Reporting
• Brand experience
• Internal governance

The objective isn't unlimited choice. It's structured choice.

An organization might offer employees multiple reward options while maintaining consistent eligibility criteria and award values.

Another might select rewards aligned with a particular program.

Another might provide a choice-based reward that allows employees to select from a broader range of brands.

This allows the employee experience to feel personal without requiring Total Rewards teams to build a completely different incentive program for every participant.

Measure Participation, Not Just Distribution

If the objective of an incentive program is employee action, success shouldn't be measured solely by the number of rewards distributed.

Total Rewards teams should start with the behavior they want to influence and determine how they will measure it.

Depending on the program, useful metrics could include:

• Participation rate
• Completion rate
• Enrollment rate
• Training completion
• Survey response
• Program utilization
• Repeat participation
• Cost per completed action
• Reward distribution
• Engagement over time

This shifts the conversation from: "How many rewards did we send?"

to: "What did employees do as a result of the program?"

That's a much more meaningful question.

It also helps Total Rewards teams evaluate whether incentive spending is supporting the broader objectives behind their workforce investments.

Incentive Strategy Is Becoming More Deliberate

The incentive industry itself reflects this shift toward more intentional program design.

The Incentive Research Foundation's 2025 Trends Report found organizations increasingly focused on budgets, efficiencies, changing participant preferences, and connecting reward and recognition programs to employee performance and broader business outcomes.

Its 2025 Top Performer research also examined how high-performing companies use non-cash rewards and recognition as part of their performance strategies rather than treating rewards as isolated perks.

For Total Rewards leaders, the implication is important: Incentives shouldn't exist simply because employees like rewards.

They should have a job to do.

That job might be increasing participation, reinforcing a behavior, recognizing achievement, improving program utilization, or encouraging employees to complete an action that supports a broader workforce objective.

How GiftCard Partners Helps Turn Total Rewards Into Employee Action

Designing an incentive program begins with a business question: What do you need employees to do?

GiftCard Partners works with organizations to help translate that objective into an incentive strategy built around specific employee actions.

That could mean encouraging participation in:

• Benefits initiatives
• Wellbeing programs
• Learning and development
• Employee recognition
• Financial wellness
• Safety programs
• Surveys and feedback
• Performance initiatives
• Other workforce programs

Through solutions including the Engage2Reward™ Gift Card Ordering Platform, organizations can deliver digital and physical gift card rewards, provide meaningful reward choice, personalize communications, manage campaigns, and track reward activity.

For programs requiring greater choice, the Engage2Reward™ Choice Card can give recipients access to a broad selection of reward options while allowing the organization to maintain a consistent incentive experience.

But the technology isn't the strategy.

The strategy is connecting the right incentive to the right employee action at the right moment.

GiftCard Partners can help organizations think through that connection and build reward programs around the behaviors they actually want to influence.

Turning Total Rewards Investment Into Employee Action

Total Rewards teams already invest significant resources in programs intended to support employees and strengthen the organization.

The next opportunity may not be adding another program. It may be getting more employees to engage with the programs that already exist.

Communication creates awareness.

Personalization creates relevance.

Choice increases perceived value.

And targeted incentives can provide the additional motivation employees need to take action.

When those pieces work together, Total Rewards becomes more than a collection of programs.

It becomes an intentional strategy for influencing the employee experience and encouraging behaviors that support both employees and the organization.

The question isn't simply: "Did employees hear about the program?"

It's: "Did they act?"

Talk with GiftCard Partners about how targeted incentives can help turn your Total Rewards investment into measurable employee participation.

Sources

• MetLife — 2025 U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study
• WorldatWork — Total Rewards Leaders Share 2025 Goals, Priorities
• WorldatWork — Total Rewards Inventory of Programs & Practices
• WorldatWork — The Year in Total Rewards: Biggest Trends of 2025
• Gallup & Workhuman — Recognition in the Workplace Research
• Incentive Research Foundation — Non-Cash Value Perception: Identifying the Tipping Point
• Incentive Research Foundation — Industry Outlook for 2025: Merchandise, Gift Cards and Event Gifting
• Incentive Research Foundation — IRF 2025 Trends Report
• Incentive Research Foundation — 2025 Top Performer Study