Image via WikipediaFinding incentives to motivate and encourage the staff of your small business to work hard can be an important aspect to maintaining the drive within your employees. In large companies this can often be a simple thing to do since there are more resources available for creating an effective employee incentive program, however; it might not be so simple in a smaller business where resources are limited.

You may not have the cash or corporate ladder structure that helps you motivate employees to succeed. It doesn’t always take a lot to push your team members toward goal achievement though, and here are a few things you may want to consider to help you do so.


Different people are motivated by different things -- money, gifts, promotions, and sometimes just simple appreciation for a job well done. Finding out what motivates your employees can help you better determine what sort of employee incentives program will work for your small business.
Creating an incentive program in which you offer promotions that you know your employees either don’t want or aren’t qualified for probably won’t do anybody much good. Similarly, by only providing chances to win lottery tickets or five dollar gift cards for a job well done when you have open positions for advancement opportunities that you know would be well-filled internally, you could be wasting a lot of talent and the ability to use such promotions as employee incentives.

All the incentives in the world may not do much good if your employees don’t know about them or understand how they are awarded. Speaking with and promoting your various types of incentives and incentive programs to your employees through fliers, posters, emails, and meetings can help spread the word and education them as to how to best reap the rewards of their hard work. Spreading the word regarding incentives can help to build excitement and also help you to get employee feedback pertaining to their thoughts and ideas about such motivators.

It’s often easy to get employee incentive programs organized and started, but with all you have to do -- especially when it comes to operating a small business -- it’s easy to set such non-essential programs to the side in order to focus on more critical aspects of running a business. Doing so however, or just not being consistent or fair with such programs can lose your credibility with your staff. Having a poorly planned, unfair, or unorganized incentive program can even do more damage than good when it comes to staff moral and motivation.
The business world is constantly changing, and what worked one day might not work the next. This is why it is important to follow up with and continue to critique your incentives programs as time goes by. Even the best incentives or incentives programs can lose their effectiveness due to numerous reasons, or might have areas that could be altered to increase their motivational power.

Ask for employees’ input as to what they would like to see in an incentives program or what changes they would make. While you don’t necessarily have to implement every piece of advice or input you receive, it could point out weak points or areas for improvement in your incentives program or in the incentives themselves.

Vincent has spent the last 10 years implementing employee recognition programs for Fortune 500 companies throughout the U.S. He currently lives in Houston and writes regularly about motivating employees on his Motivation Stream blog.