Over the years we’ve mentioned in countless articles the importance of employee engagement, and how your commitment to your employees can result in higher productivity and a reduction in costs. You may be saying to yourself “that all sounds great, but we don’t have the budget or the need to implement some fancy program” that’s where you're wrong. 

You don’t have to pull out all of the bells and whistles to engage your employees. By understanding your employee’s wants and needs, you can better budget your program and select incentives and rewards that truly play into their individual motivators.  

Spend More Time Understanding The Problems or Opportunities Up-Front

Budgeting for employee engagement programs can be simple when you are intentional during the planning process. Many organizations face issues with their budgets because the problems that they are trying to solve are not properly scoped. 

Investing more time in this process up-front can help you specify any problems or opportunities, allowing you to drill down on what could be causing a decrease in engagement, as well as discovering ways your company can improve as a whole. This can be done through root cause analysis, focus groups, and employee surveys. By collaborating with your team, you can gather useful information for developing engagement tactics that are feasible and more likely to drive an impact. 

 

Understand and Repurpose Existing Program Funding

Employee engagement programs can encompass many different aspects of company culture programs including birthdays, wellness programs, work anniversaries, and more. Because of this many companies are already spending more money on recognition than they realize. 

From locally sourcing awards, purchasing countless gift cards, and tracking down tickets to sporting events, your company is already participating in an incentive-based engagement program. 

However, with no overall recognition strategy in place, these initiatives can get lost within a mixture of unrelated efforts with little to no budget tracking and a lack of clear objectives or alignment with corporate goals. By repurposing these funds you can better understand the core budget that makes up your recognition program, while strategically designing unique programs and incentives based on your employee’s needs, as well as further aligning your teams with your company goals. 

 

Benchmark Your Employee Engagement Program and Your Budget

Understanding your company goals and opportunities is often the start to budgeting your program and maintaining success. Having benchmarks at the start of your program can ensure you are maintaining these goals as well as showcasing your improvements over time. 

A 2017 Study by WorldatWork, found that the average budget for employee recognition and rewards is between 1% and 3% of payroll, however this can get as high as 10%. Benchmarking your budget against industry standards can ensure you are not overspending, as well as further understand what programs you can offer that will continue to provide value to your employees. 

The same WorldatWork study also found that 41% of survey participants were using a recognition program software for program administration. Integrating rewards and programs into an all-inclusive platform such as our People Are Everything™ platform can help you simplify budget management, as well as monitoring program performance. 

 

Partner with a Recognition Professional

Professional recognition companies, such as ourselves can help you analyze your budget, as well as develop key company processes for budget maintenance such as program analysis, management accountability, and engagement tracking. With the help of our People Are Everything™ platform and our guaranteed budget control pricing, you can evenly monitor and distribute your budget to assist with everyday recognition, as well as provide meaningful and desirable rewards.

C.A. Short’s Guaranteed Budget Control

Our service award programs are designed to help you control and lock down your budgets. That’s why we guarantee you will never go over budget when implementing our programs. We categorize our awards into 26 different price collections, committing to one price for each collection. No matter which item in this collection your employee selects, the price you pay is guaranteed. 

No gold price fluctuations, no additional charges for shipping, and transparent, easy to read and user friendly invoices. Everything is guaranteed to be in line as originally quoted, year to year, down to the penny. No surprises!

 

Here at C.A. Short Company, we have over 80+ years of experience crafting and implementing award-winning employee engagement programs, contact us today to request a free demo of our PAE platform or discuss how we can overhaul your existing budget to provide a rewarding program that works for you. 

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