These Conditions Help Make Your Incentive Reward Morale-Friendly

Offering a travel incentive program to employees to try to increase their productivity is a common strategy that many businesses use. However, some of those businesses also create conditions that make the reward not as desirable as it should be. By carefully crafting your incentive program and the reward, you can get your employees to willingly participate and to be happy when they win. Your reward should make people want to participate, they should know what they're getting into, and they should be able to compete safely.

Working Vacation or True Time Off?

You need to decide if your travel incentive will be a true vacation reward or a partial working vacation. Certain companies turn these trips into educational travel, with seminars and work-related activities along with some employee free time. However, unless you know for a fact that your employees would love that type of trip, you may want to stick with making the incentive reward a true vacation. If your employees have just raced to the finish line in a productivity contest, sending them off for more work-related days really isn't much of a reward.

If you truly don't want to just have employees lolling around, you could make the travel have a certain theme, such as arranging for classes on the history of the place you've sent the employees to, or even cooking classes. The point is that you have to make the reward a true reward and not one that has people looking askance at you.

Transparency and Honesty

Every employee (and contractor, too, if they are also participating) needs to know the exact terms and conditions of the program. What milestones or goals do they need to reach, what will the trip entail, what will be paid for, by when do they need to go, how much flexibility they will have, will family members be allowed on the trip, and so on. Also of importance is where the money for the trip is coming from. What funds are financing this? It's important to be upfront and honest about all of this information with your employees.

Contest Environment

Finally, what conditions are you placing on the employees in the runup to the reward? Are you simply expecting the usual push for sales and just want to reward whoever reaches a goal first? Are you trying to increase sales call volume? By how much? Employees who have a chance to win a trip that they really want to go on can get more competitive, but what you don't want is to require employees to reach unrealistic goals. Ensure that employees aren't working so hard to meet the goals you set that their view of the work dims.

Sales incentive trips can be a lot of fun, and the competition can be very friendly. Ensure that your employees have a perfect incentive program that inspires them to meet goals. For more information and ideas for sales incentive programs, contact companies that specialize in programs, like Fab at Incentives.