REWARDS

Your workforce boasts incredible diversity and is multidimensional beyond measure.

Unearthing and implementing that one secret element that will excite and motivate your
employees to get to work and perform to their potential can often feel like magic you don’t
have the spell or wand for.

The key to success is to start defining your focus. What are you trying to achieve? Are you
looking to boost employee engagement at work or are you looking to boost employee
engagement in something specific, like personal health and well-being?

Your tactics to motivate employees will be different depending on your direction. But before
we get into the tactics of motivation, let’s first address the role your culture plays in
strengthening or weakening your efforts.

Culture and Motivation in the Workplace

Let’s quickly circle back to our initial question: What makes your employees push toward
greatness?

Or, along the same lines but in more simplistic terms, why do your employees work for your
company?

It’s too easy to say money; we know money isn’t the main reason they spend most of their
waking hours furthering the organization.

Many surveys and studies have strived to understand why people work. Psychologists
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan identified six reasons: play, purpose, potential, emotional
pressure, economic pressure, and inertia.

How Can Organizations Influence Workplace Motivation?

The first three of Deci and Ryan’s reasons are drivers. They’re crucial when motivating your
workforce to do anything.

Employees want to find meaning in the work they do and want to see opportunities for
personal and professional growth and development. You could almost see these as the first
layers of a Maslow’s hierarchy for employee motivation.

By recognizing the desires of your employees and ensuring your culture is hyper-focused
on supporting their play, purpose and potential, you can build, influence, and sustain a
positive work environment that promotes creativity, respect, productivity, and – above all –
continued motivation for greatness. Without this foundation, your strategy for motivating
employees is going to vary widely. Let’s take a look at the two primary categories for
rewards and recognition within the workplace:

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivators

Extrinsic rewards are usually financial or tangible rewards given to employees, such as pay
raises, bonuses, and benefits.

• They are extrinsic because they are external to completing the work itself and are
controlled by people other than the employee.
• They can be essential in jump-starting initial buy-in or participation from people in
the initial stages of readiness to change (pre-contemplation or contemplation).
• They usually have limited impact over time if they are not increased.
• They are a powerful lever to reinforce and drive the behaviors that a culture values
most but wouldn’t be the norm without. (e.g. sales commissions, performance
bonuses, etc.)
• Think of them as a defibrillator to a stopped heart. Their job is to get the heart
beating on its own.

Intrinsic rewards are psychological rewards that employees get from doing meaningful
work and performing it well.

• They are intrinsic because they are internal to the work being done and achieving
them largely depends on one’s own effort.
• They are essential to sustained behavior change.
• Can be created by allowing employees to do more self-managing and adding value to
their work by innovating, problem-solving and improvising.
• When someone achieves an intrinsic reward, there is a positive emotional reaction.
• Think of them as a pacemaker for a heart that is already beating. Their job is to
keep the heart on-pace and in rhythm.

The Problem With Strategies Based on External Motivation

Extrinsic rewards are still widely used in many organizations for a range of initiatives and
performance, but when they’re meant to increase or sustain employee engagement in
something like personal well-being, the effects can be short-lived for most people.

Again, the job of the external motivator is to jump-start the “heart” to beat on its own, just
like a defibrillator. A stopped heart needs the external jolt from a defibrillator or
compressions from CPR to get started again, but you don’t need to keep shocking the heart
once it starts beating on its own.

When an extrinsic reward influences someone to engage, the window for sustained
engagement is limited if the individual doesn’t find an intrinsic reason to continue engaging.
That switch from external to internal motivation is critical.

In environments where the culture isn’t rooted in the list of Deci and Ryan’s drivers,
employees tend only to take on extra responsibility or – dare we say it – do what’s right in
complex situations if they are going to see an external reward or payoff. Employees may
work hard in the short-term to avoid a negative consequence (like missing out on the
incentive), but this can decrease engagement and job satisfaction over time, leading to
burnout and turnover.

In conclusion, extrinsic rewards/motivators can be used effectively to engage employees in a

short-term situation to push them towards a goal. If the intrinsic motivation to meet new goals
or the same goals over time isn’t developed or does not exist in the absence of a once-present
extrinsic reward, employee engagement (in personal wellness especially) can be negatively
impacted in the long term.

5 Ways to Reward Your Team Intrinsically

You want a highly-committed, motivated workforce – as every HR professional, manager,
business owner and CEO does.

You know that when your employees are healthy and engaged, your business performance is
better, your client base or customer satisfaction scores increase, and, eventually, your
organization’s revenues and profits grow.

While we’ll never tell you that keeping employees engaged and committed to your initiatives
is easy – especially in today’s distracted workplace – you can certainly turn things around,
pick up the momentum, and sustain a healthy, flourishing, engaged culture by tapping into
your population’s intrinsic motivators.

You can establish, promote and foster intrinsic rewards through a multitude of ways:

1. Give employees more autonomy.

Employees crave control and allowing them to take responsibility for their job and tasks (and
ditching a micromanagement approach) will empower employees to take ownership and pride
in their work and see to it that projects are completed with excellence.

How this applies to wellness: Wellness committees are a perfect place for this to happen.
Give your committee actual control over decisions (instead of just the ability to provide
input) for things like programming, external events, challenges and even spending the budget.

2. Empower your employees to be self-fulfilled and purpose-driven.

Employees want to make a difference. Developing an authentic culture of purpose that your
employees rally around and believe in is vital. A great first step is hiring motivated, purpose-
driven individuals.

But this can also be achieved with your current team by encouraging employees to find
meaning in the work they do and showing them the good that came of their specific efforts
and accomplishments.

How this applies to wellness: Choose personalized interventions and program goals that meet
your employees at any point on their wellness journey. By allowing employees to learn the
skills to live a healthier lifestyle and showing them that their goals are within reach, they’re
more likely to take steps to improve.

When employees can see how their role, or even their personal health, make a difference in
the company and how the company then makes a difference in the world, they’ll be more
invested and motivated all the way around.
3. Promote social interaction.

Employees want to connect with their colleagues, especially those on other teams or in
different departments. By encouraging employees to hang out or conduct business in areas
other than their desks, and by allowing them to take a break and get out of the office to go do
something fun together, they can connect, interact, care, share, be recognized, seek to
understand others and so on.

How this applies to wellness: Create opportunities for employees to learn and practice
healthy behaviors together. Host a breakfast potluck with healthy recipes, offer to pay for a
fitness class for coworkers who attend the class together, or create a walking group at lunch.
Employee lifestyle choices do impact and influence the choices of their coworkers, so by
providing them with ideas and motivation to live healthier together, they’ll be more likely to
do so in their daily life.

4. Provide opportunities for advancement.

Employees want to progress and achieve. Human beings – not just employees – do more and
produce better work when they are making progress on something they care about. So, when
trying to motivate employees, give them a clear career path and let them stretch themselves
and demonstrate their skill set.

Through it all, be sure to recognize their efforts and achievements.

5. Investing in employees’ learning, development and well-being.

Employees want to be appreciated and valued for the hard-working individuals that they are –
on and off the clock.

Continuing education courses, professional development programs, and customized employee

wellness programs are all valuable pieces to the employee engagement puzzle.

To get the best from employees, your workplace culture and intrinsic rewarding system must
concurrently focus on company goals and objectives and employees’ total quality of life –
from work/life balance, to physical and mental health, to social and financial well-being.

When employees feel like their employer values them as professionals and individuals, they
are more likely to repay this investment through top performances, excellent work, and
genuine engagement that will advance the culture and organization.

Reap the Benefits of Higher Employee Engagement & a

Healthier Workforce
When the focus is on your employees’ well-being first and foremost, intrinsic motivators and
rewards begin to take care of themselves.

Your organization can influence workplace motivation by holistically investing in your

workforce.
At Bravo, we know that without our health and well-being, we don’t have much.

When an employee doesn’t feel well, is constantly dealing with chronic pain or illness, is
suffering in silence with a mental health issue, or is contending with stress and anxiety on a
daily basis, their work in the company is never top of mind.

They may do what they need to in order to maintain their job, but prospering is not an option
at the moment. Their health and wellness issues trump everything, and when some (if not
most) employees are working just to keep their heads above water, your culture and
company will pay the price in the long run.

Let’s talk about how a wellness solution for your company can enhance employee
engagement and culture.

Get to know Bravo’s configurable employee wellness programs that evolve to meet your
population’s needs over time.

Our programs will work to inspire your employees to achieve their personal best and protect
the benefit plans you’ve worked so hard to build.

Learn more about the tools and incentives you can use to drive year-round participation and
engagement.