GiftCard Partners Blog

A decade ago, having a “good boss” often meant someone who kept the team on schedule and paid you on time. Today the bar is much higher. Remote and hybrid work have become the norm, managers face unprecedented stress, and employees have more options than ever.

A recent Inc.om article calls NOW the time to reward employees, but they state, “If the economy gets better and job prospects improve, you may need to offer more incentives to keep your best employees”. It’s indisputable that as the economy revives, so will job opportunities to your employees and your competitors will be vicious when it comes to recruiting the best your company has to offer. Showing your staffers how much they matter is critical to TOP employee retention. GCP’s comments about how gift cards meet the 3 views of this article follow each Inc.

If you are immersed in the world of employee motivation, recognition and rewards; you’ve been hearing a lot about gamification: a business tool to integrate key techniques and mechanics into the workplace via “games”. Simply put, integrating interactive games as a tool within training or incentive programs improves employee engagement, motivation and productivity. GCP’s gift cards are well engrained in such programs as game points can be accumulated to select a really useful “prize”, like lunches at
SUBWAY, Health and Beauty items at
CVS/pharmacy, high quality, trend forward, and professional fashions from
The Limited…GCP’s gift cards are carefully selected for B2B programs like employee rewards. GCP’s recent blogs lead to gobs of the evidence that gamification should be looked at seriously within incentive programs,
Incentive Experts Point to Gamification as Top Incentive Trend,
Snowfly’s 16 Key Findings for Success white paper,
IRF’s 12 Trends in Rewards and Recognition for 2012,
Gamification Keeps Employees Engaged and Brand Image Strong…but this blog offers you a deep dive into the mechanics of gamification, data on participation levels, performance and reward successes, and what you can expect long term. Take a deep dive into gamification with “
Snowfly’s Gamification in the Workplace: 15 Key Discoveries”, by Dr. Brooks Mitchell. His work has been published and referred to in hundreds of publications, including Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and the New York Times.

For many brands, gift cards are still treated as a one-time transaction: a customer buys a card, it gets redeemed, and the interaction ends. But across the prepaid and stored-value industry, that model is changing. More consumers are not just redeeming gift cards — they are reloading them and using them repeatedly, turning what was once a simple gift into an ongoing payment and loyalty tool.

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: