It can be a challenge offering a valuable sincere employee recognition program when your company is split up into multiple locations, plants and offices with employees ranging in age, gender, income and living conditions. What might generate sincere appreciation from one employee may not bring any value to another. A customized employee program built on an e-commerce store has been proven to solve these challenges and more. If you’re considering building a employee website focused on recognizing great achievements and service-related achievements we recommend a few technology functionalities below:
Offer a Very Wide Selection of Products
These can generate sincere appreciation for all genders, ages and income levels of employees. This can be challenging if you have a minimal budget or are not interested in inventory. In this an aerial we recommend an on-demand approach where you can embroiderer or screen print just in time for shipping in small quantities as low as one product like outerwear, headwear, sweatshirts, bags and T shirts. We also have product available that can be personalized in quantities of 1.
Low and Controlled Inventory
There exists software today that can store when your employee is hired and generate automatic reports that show when an employee reaches a specific year of service or time period in our system. We can also send a message to the employee if desired with a gift code link that allows them to purchase anything on a specific budget that you’ve made available for that recognition level. For instance, an employee that reaches their one year could have a $10 budget while the employee that reaches 15 years gets a $150 budget; all of these functionalities are available and customizable per your needs. We highly recommend that you pick a technology that can customize a program alongside your goals and budget.
Recognize Automated Anniversaries
Most often times if a customer wants to reward an employee on the spot they have to go to a local grocery store or retail store to pick out a gift card or cash. Both are great if you ask any employee. As it relates to a personalized experience, an opportunity to generate brand visibility and create opportunities for your employee to tell the story of how they received their product from your company and what that achievement looked like. This is best done by driving them to a store that has your brand and also provides products at a higher perceived value than what was actually paid. The challenge with this approach is the ability to have a spontaneous gift ready for your customer or employee. In this case, systems can produce a printed gift certificate with a customized code that allows you to reward somebody on the spot that they can go to a store today and purchase whatever it is that they like from your store. I highly recommend you have this technology available so that you are never late in recognizing somebody and so that there is not a long time line from the date in which they were recognized to the point in which they receive that product.
On-Demand
On-demand product availability saves on inventory costs, shipping costs, storage costs and receiving costs. If you produce an on-demand product it will allow you to see what products are being ordered and what products are not without facing inventory risks of losing money and products that you produced. Whenever possible we recommend our clients that they approach a product in an on-demand production approach first prior to investing in any real inventory. The drawback is time as it usually takes anywhere from 4 to 10 business days to produce a product on-demand but most of our clients find it to be well worth the couple extra days; as the risk of products becoming obsolete or products that are purchased at all become less and less of an issue.
No Inventory and Selection
Multiple cost centers, better branding visibility. If you are exploring a recognition program that involves the locations, plants, offices, facilities and recognizes employees that work from home. We understand the importance of knowing who’s being recognized, how often they’re being recognized, what plants are performing better, where recognition costs are coming from, what employee demographics are scoring highest, and as result we recommend technologies that can capture that data such as cost centers, shipping locations, tracking on product, delivery and multiple spending functionalities like purchase order, credit card, and gift card. We work hand-in-hand with our clients to ensure the right data is being captured to best identify the health of the program and where there’s an opportunity to improve and where it might be excelling beyond our expectations.
Flexible Payments, Data and Reporting
In today’s world analytics are senior to operating blind and just guessing what is and is not working. You can gather all the data you need to figure out what people are appreciating, or purchasing, most and you can expand on products that are proven to be enjoyed by your employees. Being able to offer many options for a gift is nice but you will need data so you can knowledgeably add new products that will be enjoyed and appreciated. If you wanted to offer expensive gifts you can build in credit card capabilities if you wanted to help an employee with a purchase.
Tracking
Personalisation and customization Whenever possible adding personalization, a team name or a specific achievement can be very powerful in the recognition process. A person’s name is one of the nicest sounding words any person can hear. So adding their name and their achievement and an award pin, pen, mug, shirt and anything else that you can personalize can dramatically impact the value of recognition to that specific employee. When thinking about any e-commerce store that offers variable customization can be a difference of an employee feeling greatly recognized and appreciated versus the standard 1 size fits all approach. With our stores we make products with customization available very easily with boxes of text that can be available on specific products. It’s also important to note our customers typically like to have the order approved when an employee puts in their own personal information. In those scenarios the employee chooses the product they want and the approver will have an opportunity to approve the project before it’s ever put into production.