Do Employee Incentive Programs Encourage Teamwork?

Once upon a time, the way you got paid for the job you did was very simple. You worked a set number of hours and you got a commensurate amount of money. Later, when the idea of commission arose, it was more performance-related. If you sold enough, arranged enough meetings, or did enough of whatever else you had to do, you would get paid by the result. This was attractive to the most successful workers, as it provided them with a reward for performance, but it was less attractive to those whose abilities in the job were less measurable by statistics. As a consequence, there has been a kind of uneasy stand-off between assured salaries and commission-based remuneration for some time now.

In the present time, then, there have to be smarter solutions. There are genuinely some people who are excellent at their job in a way which does not fit in neatly to a commission based rewards program. Some people are more useful to a company because they are meticulous with their attention to detail and their fact-checking abilities. Others are worth their weight in gold because they are capable of motivating their co-workers to produce more and more each day. As things stand, however, there is no way of statistically monitoring someone's motivational, improvisational brilliance. The boss who wants to be fair to their entire workforce needs to think outside the box when it comes to rewards and incentives. One way of doing this is to have a team incentive program.

A team incentive program may initially seem like it would reward the slackers in a team and punish the high achievers. After all, if the team is achieving results but some members are not quite hitting the heights, then it stands to reason that the team's success is down in large part to the big hitters, and the rewards should go to them. And in many cases this is what happens. However, the fact of the matter is that a manager who knows their team can design a reward and incentive package that will creatively reward the team for their success while also paying tribute to the members of the team who really excelled themselves.

Rewards can be big or small, and can be given on the basis of measured results or on the say-so of other team members. There are several different ways that a person can impact on the positive performance of their team, and it merely starts with the statistical breakdown. By collating the opinions of other team members, as well as monitoring the group dynamic, it is possible for a boss to agree a reward package that will benefit not only the high achievers but also the hard workers, the motivators, the facilitators, and everyone else without whom a team would not function quite as well. It might usually be the running back or the wide receiver that scores a touchdown, but they would not have a chance to get there if the offensive line was not performing. A team is much greater than the sum of its parts, and a boss who realizes that can work wonders.