Choosing to run an online employee incentive program doesn’t always fall under the HR department’s responsibility, but it tends to be their responsibility to set up the infrastructure including getting employees onboard. This can prove to be a daunting task if the company has thousands of employees.
But why should HR care about online employee incentive programs? Is it worth it? Are there easier ways?
HR typically deals with the general populous of the company, whether it’s a handful of employees or tens of thousands. Not only is HR enforcing company policies, they’re also trying to improve behavior, morale and influence things within the company so that it becomes more efficient while reducing turnover. There are high costs attached in the hiring process; interviewing candidates and training newly hired employees can prove to be expensive in company resources such as time. There’s also the risk of having to redo this process if the newly hired employee isn’t a great fit within the company.
The use of online employee incentive programs are very similar in HR to retirement programs or health insurance programs, and is used to attract top talent and to retain employees. What online employee incentive programs have done is considerably reduce the administrative burden by taking out the manual management aspect of regular incentive programs. So rather than using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of incentives and someone within the company going out to purchase said incentives, everything is automated and tracked in a software. This becomes more simplified and less of a daunting task to implement and consistently run.
One could argue that you could always increase commission levels for the sales department, but the drawback with that is it only effects the sales department and there are still reasons to implement a sales incentive program. Online employee incentive programs take the hassle of manual implementation and upkeep and gives management, C‐levels, and the HR department the opportunity to recognize and reward, whatever they deem worth recognizing and rewarding, all employees within the company.
When you look at an online employee incentive program from a cost perspective, it’s not a huge financial burden on the company, especially if the company already has an incentive program. Even though you are paying for the software and the rewards, what the company saves on retaining employees evens it out. Employees are more likely to become more loyal, productive, and overall very happy working for the company. It lowers employee turnover so the company saves resources not having to constantly hiring and train new employees and lowers absenteeism and increase employee motivation so the company is more productive and efficient.
Even though there is some effort that is needed to implement an online employee incentive program, which is much lower than the manual incentive programs, and there are some costs attached to it, the benefits are worth it. The HR department will see what kind of a difference it will make and will make their jobs much easier in the end.