How Businesses with Distributed Teams are Adapting their Employee Reward Programs

While remote working arrangements used to be a relatively rare occurrence for many businesses, today, it’s become much more common. There are a lot of benefits that come with offering flexible scheduling options for employees, including reduced overhead and better access to global talent.

However, trying to maintain regular communication with teams across different time zones can be a challenge. This also extends to running various recognition programs that take “every” employee’s contributions into account, regardless of where and when they work.

For growing organizations, adapting employee reward programs to more modernized working structures is critical for helping to build team morale and improve staff retention. Below, we’ll discuss various ways that many businesses are achieving this.

Using More Centralized Platforms

One of the most challenging aspects of supporting hybrid or fully-remote working positions is geography. When you have all your employees in one place and during the same hours, it’s much easier to coordinate team-building events or structure different reward programs. However, when teams are scattered across the globe, keeping these types of efforts inclusive and consistent can be tough to do.

To help bring teams into the same working environment, many businesses are investing in centralized management platforms. While some of these platforms are enterprise-level, others are designed simply to help employees manage their own individual tasks. Regardless, the main benefit of these digital solutions is that they keep all company operations visible from one place.

Popular tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams are a great place to start, which can help organizations communicate with all of their employees and ensure they’re always in the loop. They can also roll out company-wide initiatives, like reward programs, that everyone can access and participate in.

Keeping Rewards More Personalized

Employee recognition programs have been around for a while now, and there's no shortage of off-the-shelf templates businesses can use to get their own started. But in order for a recognition program to have any real impact on employees, they need to feel authentic in their design and execution. 

Choosing a more adaptable and flexible program based on your own employees’ unique needs and preferences is often the best strategy for building stronger connections with them. This could mean offering them flexible lifestyle spending accounts, providing stipends for home office equipment, or simply giving employees a wider range of choices when offering gift cards or other performance incentives.

By letting employees have more say in how they’re incentivized, it shows you're doing more than just handing out generic rewards and actually making  sure they’re feeling recognized and valued for their accomplishments.

Integrating Recognition Workflows Into Daily Tasks

The timing of a reward is a really important, but often overlooked, element in creating a successful recognition program. A "thank you" that arrives six weeks after the fact just rarely has the same impact as providing it immediately after it’s deserved. While the intention itself may be genuine, long delays can cancel out the positive effect you're trying to create.

It’s important to remember that providing recognition isn’t just about showing appreciation. It can also be a powerful tool for reinforcing positive behaviors. If staff members feel there's a huge lag before their contributions are seen or acknowledged, they may start to assume that their extra effort isn’t really worth their time.

A really good way to solve this problem is to embed your recognition systems and workflow directly into the team's existing tasks. Doing this allows you to offer real-time rewards tied to specific productivity outputs. This kind of setup is especially valuable for remote teams where employees and their managers might not share the same working hours. Instead of letting their hard work slip through the cracks, integrated platforms can issue rewards immediately or prompt management to follow up with the employee directly.

Placing More Importance on Employee Well-Being

Showing staff appreciation doesn’t always need to be about money. There are other, non-monetary rewards you can offer that demonstrate you not only appreciate your employees, but you view them as individuals.

For example, many organizations are now expanding their recognition efforts to celebrate actions that help employees live healthier and happier lives. This can be done in a variety of easy ways, such as offering additional time off to spend with friends and family, or hosting wellness retreats for both your in-office and remote-working employees.

Not Forgetting About Personal Milestones

Another challenge when having remote working teams is that they no longer have access to those informal chats by the coffee machine or chatting as they walk by each other in the hall. These are great team-building opportunities that can be missed out on. To help fill that social gap, employee appreciation initiatives are starting to broaden their scope to acknowledge people more regularly online.

By taking the initiative to publicly recognize work anniversaries, birthdays, and other significant personal occasions, you can build stronger relationships with your team.

Using Data to Help Drive Better Engagement

In order to know if all your recognition efforts are actually landing with your teams, you need to have a hard look at the data. By monitoring key performance indicators within your program, you can get a much deeper understanding of whether these investments are actually connecting with everyone or not.

Taking a data-driven approach to building and improving your recognition programs lets you spot irregularities or underlying issues and address them right away. This type of real-time feedback allows you to make improvements and turn your program initiatives into a measurable plan for building a better work environment for everyone.

Keep Your Company Reward Programs Relevant

When you're building a program designed to recognize your employee contributions, it’s important to keep it flexible, consistent, and fair. By following the strategies discussed, you’ll ensure that “all” employees, regardless of where they work, feel like they’re an important part of the team and valued for the work they contribute.

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Cindy Mielke is passionate about the incentive industry. In addition to her role as Vice President of Strategic Partners here at Tango, she is a Certified Professional of Incentive Management who proudly serves on two industry boards. When she’s not working, Cindy enjoys spending time with her family—including three cats, two dogs, and a horse—and sharing her love of nature as a Nebraska Master Naturalist.