Incentives Related Articles

Snowfly’s long-standing relationships with companies within the Healthcare and Health Insurance industries offer some unique use cases for our software system. Because many of these customers require that their employee recognition opportunities are very job-specific and are often focused primarily around customer service and/or patient care feedback, Snowfly has adapted over the years to change right along with the landscape of healthcare and health insurance providers.

In these highly specialized and highly technical job roles, care must be given to ensure that the overall customer/patient experience is the paramount driver of success. Peer-to-Peer recognition is a hallmark of many of our healthcare related client programs because a work environment that fosters teamwork and ensuring that the client/patient has the best possible customer service experience is the ultimate goal. Despite Peer-to-Peer recognition being present in all of these programs, each of our client companies handles their P2P recognition process differently. Some choose to reward all those who are recognized by a peer, some choose to make each individual peer recognition an entry into an overall contest for the end of the month, quarter, or year. No matter how it is accomplished, providing co-workers with the ability to recognize one another for the daily small and simple things, or even the big unexpected things, builds cohesion and camaraderie within the workplace.

Another benefit of using the Snowfly platform for these industry clients is their ability to assign, track, and follow-up on required trainings that must be completed by employees to remain current with industry compliance standards. Because many of these individuals are working with customer/patient personal sensitive and confidential information (PPI/PCI), their employers are required to provide proof of PPI/PCI compliance and completion of mandatory training for each employee who has access to any such information. Providing a simple and effective way to communicate to the employee which training modules need to be completed, which training modules have already been completed, and rewarding employees for staying current on their training and certifications makes tracking this important data very easy. The Snowfly system also allows the employer to put the responsibility on the shoulders of the employees themselves to maintain their certifications, especially if they want to earn the incentive rewards that are tied to those behaviors.

Finally, due to the highly-skilled and often specialized positions that are filled by the employees of our customers within these industries, ensuring that a fully-staffed workforce is present for each day is critical to the success of the organization. Because one individual in a given department may not be able to fill in at another position if someone else is out unexpectedly, it becomes even more critical to ensure that daily employee attendance and schedule adherence are both emphasized. For most of these clients, that includes rewards that earned for daily/weekly/monthly attendance metrics and schedule adherence as well as being vigilant in pre-planning and receiving prior approval for any requests for vacation and/or time-off. Unexpected absences due to employees calling-in to work or simply missing their scheduled shifts without any explanation are highly disruptive and often very costly for these companies. By providing incentives to those employees who are able to accrue long periods of time without any unexpected absences or un-planned time away from work (coming into work late or needing to leave work early), the emphasis is placed upon reinforcing the desired attendance behaviors of the organization; those employees who then meet or exceed those expectations are rewarded for doing so.

Snowfly’s expertise in working with multiple healthcare/health insurance companies has grown over the years which has given us the opportunity to learn what behaviors and rewards are truly effective for this type of client. As we have proven with these industry customers, the flexibility to adapt to the changes within the industry has made Snowfly an important partner in the successful care of their customers/patients by their employees; when you demonstrate care for the well-being and success of your employees, they will in-turn exhibit that same care and concern for your customers.

When working with clients whose employee rewards program is primary focused on Sales, Snowfly’s software system easily adapts to their needs and, no surprise here, most of the incentives are based upon sales commissions and or achieving specific sales goals, milestones, and/or quotas.

In sales-related jobs, it is often the top performers who are also the most highly compensated. But monetary compensation is often incorrectly seen as the only way to motivate salespeople rather than just one of several ways to engage and reward your top performing sales staff. There are really several key ways that employees are motivated and providing a combination of as many of them as possible is the surest way to keep your sales staff engaged and working hard to close more sales.

First, the best sales teams have multiple sets of goals that provide short-term, medium-term and long-term achievement levels that provide many opportunities for a salesperson to feel a genuine sense of accomplishment at frequent intervals. Having only monthly or quarterly sales goals or quotas means you are missing out on the power of daily and weekly celebration opportunities for your sales team. Small, incremental daily rewards are so powerful in providing salespeople, especially those whose sales cycles may be months, or even years, in length.

The longer the sales cycle and the higher the value or cost of the product being sold, the more important it is for salespeople to have their steps towards closing the sale celebrated and recognized along the way. To enhance your overall sales, think about ways that you can break-up your annual or quarterly sales targets into monthly, weekly and daily goals…or maybe even down to hourly goals if appropriate. Sales SPIFs can be for very small actions taken and don’t have to be large (or even monetary) to get the attention of your sales team. Keep in mind that a sales person sees progress with every step taken is one who is more likely to get across the finish line and close more sales.

Second, you must understand and accept that while money is highly motivating to most, if not all people, it may not be the MOST important thing to many people. Rewards that are offered for sales performance should be desirable to each individual person and, ideally, each person should be able to choose the reward that is most motivating to them. Understand that being flexible in the rewards offered to your sales team provides added motivation that may not cost you anything.

In his great article on HubSpot entitled “How to Motivate your Sales Team: 8 Tried-and-True Strategies”, author Dan Tyre recounts an experience in working at Lotus where he anecdotally shares the truth that many people are highly motivated by public recognition and that a small trophy that has no value to an outsider can be an extremely effective form of motivation and reward. Other forms of non-monetary recognition include: promotion to a special project team or team lead, offering to cater lunch for a contest winner and some colleagues of their choice, giving them more freedom and autonomy to set their own hours (if appropriate), to work part of the day for them, to let them work from home, etc. In today’s day and age of “work-life-balance” being so critical to keeping the best performing employees, recognizing your employees for their performance also needs to have flexibility built into the program.

Finally, employing some aspects of competition within your sales team can also be a very effective way to engage and motivate sales people. By nature, most sales people are at least somewhat competitive, and their personality types often gravitate towards “winning” in various forms. However, don’t assume that everything must be a competition or that there always needs to be “winners” and losers. Competition can also be instituted with one person competing against his or her past performance and competition can be between different sales teams, shifts, or departments as well where the end goal is not “winning” but demonstrating overall performance improvement. These types of competitions can foster a sense of camaraderie and team-spirit when working towards a common goal and often allow for those who may not “win” as frequently as others to have more opportunities to feel successful when contributing to the overall results of their team. The concept of implementing engaging Sales “contests” is nothing new to anyone who manages a sales team, but with some small programming tweaks and with some strategy in how and when to employ sales contests, the competition aspect of the contests can be extremely effective for everyone involved.

Because of our experience in having worked with multiple sales teams across many industries, we can truthfully say that there is no one compensation package or one set of rules that will apply to every company and to every sales team. As such, it is critical that your Employee Recognition program is easily adaptable and can flex with your company’s ever-changing needs and with the various personalities found on your sales team. Snowfly continues to be successful with sales organizations of all shapes and sizes and with products ranging from hotel accommodations to fine jewelry to storage units to legal services because we help our Sales clients create the unique employee recognition program that works for their individual teams and because their programs are never static but can be adjusted on-the-fly, whenever necessary, to meet the recognition and compensation needs of their team in that moment.