Effective Reward Systems For Motivating Your Team

Rewards and recognition plays a very important role in the life of every individual. It is the primary responsibility of every project manager to keep motivating his team in any form. Even thanking each and every team member individually, is also a form of reward and motivation.

The rewards need not to be monetary always. If you have a highly result oriented team that generally meets the deadlines or the team has started performing on its own then, ensure that the team continue with the same enthusiasm and energy throughout the project. You can also reward them by giving a mandatory off or recommending their names for professional or professional development trainings conducted in your company.
At times the most demotivating behavior of management is their failure to provide feedback and recognition to right set of people. At times resources complain regarding their dissatisfaction of not being valued in their current profile. Moreover by allocating a critical project to the key players is a golden opportunity to get noticed. Food is also a motivator, many challenges and unresolved issues would magically be solved by having good food. The best motivator is to provide feedback and recognition. In addition to these two, the motivating factor for the most skilled and high performing resources, is give them more challenging work. Some people love new challenges as it provides them the satisfaction of being important and recognized, thereby providing a good opportunity to be highlighted.

As far as having a reward system is concerned most of the organizations do have some kind of Quarterly, Half Yearly, or Annual awards which are given away to recognize the employees. However, it is worthwhile to mention that the importance of such awards gets diluted because corporate politics and other constraints. Hence, the non- monetary rewards, must be spontaneous and must be decided by the Project Manage because the Project Manager is the best person to provide recognition and visibility to the team at higher levels. For some the biggest reward and motivator is respect.

In order to motivate a team, each team member should experience reward at a deeper level. As a project manager it is difficult to deduce what this deeper level may be for his team members, as their motivation drivers may differ significantly from each other. But this is where the difference between a good and average project manager lies – in the ability to not only drive the project within the project parameters but also to be emotionally intelligent enough to “know” the team members and address or at least direct motivational drive towards their individual focus areas.
As long as there is punishment for wrong doing there should be motivation for those who perform well. Motivation may be monetary or not monetary. It may be monthly, quarterly, or annually depending on the policy of each organization. It may be ordinary token of thanks like a certificate to the performers, or gift vouchers as per your company’s policies Motivation goes a long way to encourage the resources to perform even better in the future.

About Aditi Malhotra

Aditi Malhotra is the Content Marketing Manager at Whizlabs. Having a Master in Journalism and Mass Communication, she helps businesses stop playing around with Content Marketing and start seeing tangible ROI. A writer by day and a reader by night, she is a fine blend of both reality and fantasy. Apart from her professional commitments, she is also endearing to publish a book authored by her very soon.

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