Employee Incentives for Small Businesses

Many small and medium sized businesses want to establish employee incentive programs to encourage greater productivity and efficiency, but think these types of programs can only be successfully run by large corporations with big budgets and large management teams. This type of thinking can be very limiting to the success and growth of your company. Any small or medium sized business can create corporate sized programs on the budget and time restrictions of a small business.   

As our Michigan IT services company, Vision Computer Solutions, continues to grow our business and expand our staff, we want our employees to feel that their hard work and extra efforts are noticed and appreciated. In order to ensure our employees have the best care and attention, I have expanded the scope of my role as the vice president of operations. In this role, my time is mostly focused on human resources, leadership development, and management of a highly productive and highly technical staff. This summer, I sat down with the rest of the leadership team at Vision Computer Solutions to create an employee incentive program to actively engage our staff and excite them about growing our business.

Since the creation of our incentive program in August, we have seen over 70% improvement rate on all key performance indicators, including the intangibles outside of the normal IT tasks, that result in a successful Michigan IT service business. The one stipulation to our incentive program is that we must meet our predetermined monthly sales goals in order for the monthly prize drawing to take place. Simply put: if we don’t perform, we don’t get rewarded.

There is no one-size-fits-all incentive solution that works for every business, so I won’t go into the details of ours. I encourage you to take some time to listen to your employees, find the pain points in your business, and create a plan that fits within your budget and time requirements.

The implementation of a well thought out and properly executed incentive program can boost employee morale, generate excitement in the workplace, encourage above-and-beyond performance, and increase overall business productivity. I encourage all small and medium sized business owners to consider implementing a similar strategy and see a positive change in your workplace! A great corporate culture really can be created on a small business budget.