It’s quite surprising to know that despite increasing levels of unemployment, finding skilled people for the role and retaining asset employees are as difficult as ever.  There are a few reasons for this: stiff competition brought by overflowing demands for certain skills, scarce human resource in the market, or poor employee retention or rewards program. The first two could easily strangle businesses if we talk about budget.  But the last item could be addressed by an enticing and unconventional rewards system.

In a recent report, Vice President of Staples Promotional Products, the promotional products and incentives business for Staples Advantage, Anne McKeough explains the significance of employee rewards and recognition execution becoming an asset for employers to drive better performance and increase loyalty within the organization. She said,

“Employees often love a little extra incentive to achieve goals – and employers are eager to find unique ways to deliver results. Incentive programs promote a competitive and rewarding culture and, if creatively and effectively implemented, can strengthen company morale.

Employee incentives are not all about money. Creatively rewarding good performance defines the sincerity of the company to improve motivation. Travel perks, which used to be one of the most appealing company benefits, are seemingly making a strong comeback. Although with the present situation, these may not be as lavish and long like the ones employees got to enjoy before. Still, this is something to look forward to, especially to employees with families. Some enterprises’ also offer unlimited vacation that would set you free of guilt from overusing your annual time off privileges.

These are relatively the traditional way of companies’ are giving back to their employees, and are existent in 80-90% of competitors.  Now, if we try to dig a little deeper, you may want to tap into technology for incentivizing employees.

Flexibility Via virtual working:

The global workforce is turning to mobility and the trend suggests that flexibility in work hours and working virtually are becoming popular.  Having an online platform where your workforce can collaborate even when not physically present in the office is a nice idea for those who seek flexibility in schedule.  Workplace mobilization/virtualization is one of the main focuses of VMware today as they attempt to integrate work parameters to a worker’s personal device by way of data virtualization.  This will in turn allow the employee to access his or her office tools and files while enjoying the “work from home” incentive.

Workplace Gamification:

With social and mobile gaming gaining massive and solid following, it is a good idea for businesses to replicate the competitive environment in these platforms. A striking book review on gamification by Kristen Nicole provided angles on how this strategy parallels to the work arena.  There are two major benefits that can be drawn from this: one is that employees are powered by rewards by above-excellent performance, and two is pushing workers to interact more, collaborate and promote a sound working relationship by working as a team, especially for group perks.

Real-time recognition on the Big Screen:

Don’t deny it—you love it when your boss brags about your latest accomplishment to the whole world. But what about having large screens displaying your fabulous works versus business performance metrics? Sounds good? Thank Rypple for creating Rypple Flow, an employee rewards and recognition service and software that provide a social feed optimized for big screen televisions to highlight work excellence.

High staff turnover nowadays is inevitable, even with the low employment rate on countries with an ailing economic state.  Stripping a little something from your corporate wallet to support employee incentives schemes may not hurt, compared to costly investment in machines and resources to hire a skilled newbie to replace a home-grown veteran.  In many years in the human resources field, organizational sweeteners would often refer to perks, which would eventually translate to productivity and aggressive performance.  In today’s realm, establishing a positive employer brand is not only substantial in establishing good employee-employer relationship, but in creating a solid recruitment tool.