Rewarding employees can be tricky business. Unfortunately, despite your best efforts to provide meaningful rewards to your employees, your efforts to reward employees can go terribly wrong. Understanding who you are rewarding is critically important to achieving the goals of your reward programs. This lack of understanding can result in some unanticipated results, causing your employees to not feel rewarded and even feel punished because of your reward programs. It is important to understand that a reward to one employee can be a punishment to another. To decide if the following would potentially be a reward or a punishment to employees, you might be trying to provide some form of recognition or opportunity in their careers:
- Extra work
- New assignment
- Job transfer
- Public recognition
- Overtime
- New office/workstation
- Lunch with the boss