Rewarding Employee Performance

Having an organizational strategy for recognizing and rewarding employee performance can play an important role in promoting employee retention. A reward program helps bolster employee self-esteem and job satisfaction by showing that you appreciate staff contributions to the success of your company.

A well-designed reward program should:

• Have a long-term focus
• The program should do more than recognize past performance, it should also inspire employees to set and meet long-term performance goals.
• Involve employees
• Involving employees in the development and management of the reward program (e.g., selecting the rewards, nominating candidates, selecting goals and targets) makes it more meaningful and motivational.
• Incorporate both formal and informal rewards
• Formal rewards, provided by objective criteria and processes, should be augmented with informal rewards provided spontaneously to more immediately recognized desired behaviours.