Promotional Products Work As Employee Awards And Incentives

Awards and incentive programs can improve performance and motivate employees to increase sales, reduce accidents, boost productivity and give customers better service. In 1994 Baylor University randomly surveyed 1,500 people, asking their opinions regarding employee awards and incentives.

Findings

Survey recipients were asked to rate how most employees feel about awards and incentives. The TRUE statements are those with which respondents agreed; the FALSE statements are those with which they disagreed.

TRUE	FALSE
Employees like awards and incentives.	Employees are not interested in the awards or incentives, so the program has no impact on their behavior.
Employees are motivated to win the awards.
Employees work hard to win the awards.	Employees do not believe they have a chance to win an award or incentive, so they don't even try.
Employees encourage each other to work toward awards and incentives.

Survey respondents also listed the reasons they believe award and incentive programs sometimes fail. The top two reasons for program failure are:

Employees are not involved in the planning process - just managers.
Employees lose interest in programs because they are not given timely feedback.

This indicates that effective employee award and incentive programs will feature high employee involvement during the development of the program and timely feedback to employees during the contest.