GiftCard Partners Blog

In order to effectively use an employee rewards program you have to know what will drive your employees. Knowing what is most important to your workforce is critical in motivating them to reach their maximum potential. Here are a few key factors that could drive your employees. Find out what matters most to them, and plan your employee engagement and recognition accordingly.

According to a recent Gallup poll 71% of employees felt either  “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their job. The emotional disconnect running rampant in professional settings across the country leads to decreased retention, and lack of employees' emotional investment in their jobs. To prevent your employees from feeling disconnected at work, here are three simple ways to engage them. When an organization's leadership takes the time and financial investment and puts it toward employee happiness and engagement it shows employees their organization supports the individuals that make it successful. I would swap these two sentences, that way when you say here are three ways in goes straight into them.

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

Creating a culture of professional development is key to an organization. This is a great way to show employees that you invest in their best interests, the way they invest themselves in their work and the goals of the company. Here are some tips for how to maintain a culture of development in your organization. • 
Identify your stars: Focus on rewarding and recognizing top performers. Providing spot rewards for desired behavior, such as a gift card or an extra day off is a low-cost way to show employees you care. These rewards and recognition can lead to higher retention rates and workplace satisfaction. • 
Get upper management involved: Visibility of senior management during professional development, to provide guidance and mentoring is another sign of organizational support to employees. • 
Invest in development: Providing training sessions, professional development opportunities, and even tuition reimbursement helps employees grow, which will make it more likely that employees will stay and grow with your organization. • 
Broaden their skills: Make sure skill sets are round, and that employees understand organizational functions outside of their day to day responsibilities, this will help them think strategically about their current role, and ways to advance themselves in the organization.
For more information on creating a culture of development in your organization check out this article in Ragan's HR Communication.

What do organizations like the Soldier Family Assistance Center, the Fisher Houses, the Mologne House, the Navy Lodge, the Red Cross, and the Bethesda Causality Affairs Office all have in common? They are working with Operation Gift Card to give back to the men and women who have given so much for our country. Donations of $71,000 in gift certificates and special group product donations have been delivered by these organizations for both wounded troops and their families. Operation Gift Cards began in October of 2005 and in the past 7 years has also sent 6,810 thank you kits, containing $136,000 in military store gift certificates to our wounded soldiers. For more information on this amazing organization or to learn how you can send a ‘Thank You’ to our troops, visit
Operation Gift Cards. GiftCard Partners sells gift cards in bulk and offers discounts to organizations like Operation Gift Card every day. If you are interested in sending a bulk gift card order to Operation Gift Card,
contact us today!