You may or may not have heard of Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream…!”. Whether you have or haven’t, the point coming across is each and every person on this planet has a dream. Some dreams are smaller but simple or bigger but complex. We all have different dreams and we hope to achieve them one day. A common dream that every person has is to explore what the real world has to offer – aka. travel for a holiday. How managers can take this conception to work in their favour is by providing a mean to achieve these dreams. It’s also a chance to offer the right rewards and incentives in exchange for productivity and performance. Understanding how providing the right rewards and incentives at your workplace will help your employees visualise success in the long term.

Why should we provide rewards and incentives?

What is it that you want and do anything for? Whatever popped up in your mind is what’s driving you to continue doing what you’re doing. In the workplace setting, your employees are feeling the same. The push to finish work is exhausting and the thing that can motivate you to push through is an incentive.

While the incentive is motivating, the overall aim is to try satisfy an underlying need. This need as explored is the ideal dream – of wanting to explore beyond the boundaries of the office. When you equip your employees with the tools to satisfy their need-turned-into-a-reality, you see them driven to achieve.

Types of rewards and incentives

Rewards and incentives that drive motivation can be categorised as either monetary or non-monetary. Either one can used as ways for achieving dreams as they both help your employees get closer to their dream. Monetarily, we have bonuses and reimbursements. These two cover the financial aspect of fulfilling needs – because with most wants-turned-into-needs, you’ll need to pay for it somehow. For example, a bonus will ensure that your employee can utilise personal private consumption without feeling the need to budget for the cost of living.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have non-monetary rewards. There’s a myriad of creative and more traditional ways out there that you can implement at a low-cost for your organisation. A few examples could include signing your employee up for an upcoming conference, letting them use a better car spot or even getting them a new comfy work chair. While rewards and incentive do have an impact on your budget, these tangible retributions enable your employees to expand their horizons. To illustrate, conducting a business trip to happen in Vienna when you situate in Australia will let your employees experience a foreign destination while completing a work mission. While this may look like doing business as per usual for some; the environment and surroundings are taken in as part of the experience. You open your employee to enrich themselves with what real life has to offer.

To understand that the underlying dream to most wants-turned-into-needs as individual enrichment, are tools for leaders such as yourself. Equip them with the right rewards and incentives to stimulate a motivation inside them. Once you’ve done so, you see them working to their fullest potential to attain them. That right there is performance, and once your company manifests that, you see productivity peak, goals being met and a greater capacity to grow for profitability. It really is a benefit for both you and your employee.

Implementing a system of rewards and incentives is just one element for creating a happy workplace for your co-workers. Find out how to nurture a positive work environment by downloading “Your Guide to a 5-Star Workplace”: