How Does Your Agency Reward Top Performers?

It is no big secret that rewarding and recognising people who perform well in any business is important in keeping people motivated, as well as ensuring they feel appreciated by the senior people in the business. In almost all competitive or sales based environments various methods can be used to reward excellence and incentivise staff to go the extra mile for the business, and recruitment is no exception. Different agencies use different ways to dish out rewards and appreciation to their top performers, and while there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach that yields better results than others, some things do seem to work really well in most agencies that use them whereas others are a bit more ‘meh’. Here we look at a few different ways to reward staff and their advantages:

Leader Boards and League Tables
Arbitrary ’employee of the month’ schemes have long been dismissed in business as something staff don’t really care about or feel especially motivated to win. However, in competitive, target driven environments having a leader board of the top performers each week or month can actually inspire healthy competition, whether there is a prize for winning or just the glory of being number one. Of course, there needs to be a way to make these competitions work even when people have very different targets or clients or recruit for different niches, for example ranking by percentage over target. A great way to do this is to use One-Up Sales, which use gamification technology to deliver an all-in-one activity management solution which integrates with Chameleon-i.

Luxury Prizes
People whose jobs earn commission are used to having money as a constant motivator and reward, which means if you want to give them an extra incentive it pays to think of something very enticing, but which isn’t necessarily cash or cash equivalents like gift vouchers. Often, things they couldn’t buy themselves like corporate hospitality tickets to sports events you might be going to with clients you are entertaining can be a really good reward for high performance or a prize for winning an internal performance based competition. Alternatively, luxury prizes can work well – things that most people would like but would feel overly extravagant buying for themselves.

Simple Kudos!
The cheapest, but in many ways most appreciated, way to reward consistent good performance, or just doing a good job on something, is simply to give a sincere show of appreciation to the team member, preferably in front of the rest of the team or company. Weekly team meetings are the ideal place to show appreciation for all the small wins people made over the week and strongly reward any major ones. Not everything needs a financial reward or a gift, but it is important to instil in your office culture a sense that hard work is at the very least noticed and appreciated, to keep everyone feeling positive and satisfied.

These are just some of the things agencies put in place to give recognition to the top performers, and of course, some businesses do find unique ways to incentivise and reward the best work. Do you have any unusual or innovative ways you inspire and thank the people in your business? If so, please tell us about them in the comments!