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.

Although safety programs are effective for cutting workplace injuries in all workplace environments; manufacturing is an optimal industry segment to promote workplace safety incentives. Workplace environments can be harsh and employee safety is a number one concern and constant initiative. Formal safety reward programs provide an important function to motivate employees to take proper safety precautions and adapt to the safer behaviors that your environment demands. If employees are motivated to take safety awareness seriously enough to reduce the likelihood of accidents, and the program is properly structured with measurement methods in place; the company will realize ROI in increased performance, and reduced healthcare insurance premiums. Following are a few examples of typical safety and workplace incentive programs that manufacturers employ:

In the travel and hospitality industry, loyalty programs have long relied on points to keep guests engaged. But as budgets tighten and competition heats up, a new approach is emerging — one that offers instant gratification.

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

Does your company work in the cloud? According to a new Elance Report the number of businesses seeking to hire online contractors doubled in 2011. 83% of the small businesses surveyed by Elance said they plan to hire up to half of their workforce as virtual in the next 12 months. GiftCard Partners was built on a virtual model and has been recognized for its ability to function in alternative ways, free of the constraints of a 9-5 office atmosphere. Here are Elance's predictions for the 10 most popular online jobs going forward