A Strategic Reward System is a tool often used by the Human Resource Management involving a set of recognition and appreciation plans of action that reward the performance of the employees within a business.
Every company nowadays simply has to have a Strategic Reward System offering if they are to create a highly attractive Employee Value Proposition. In other words a set of benefits that will motivate an employee to join and perform well within the business as well as part of compensation for their skills, capabilities and experience.
As Staff Retention evidently stands strong amongst the Top Challenges faced by the Hospitality Industry within the UK, it is time to break down the ice; and split the idea into digestible chunks. The two previous articles have helped us to divide the issue of Staff Retention into two manageable solutions: Employee Recognition and Appreciation and their implementation successors the Rewards and Incentives. As knowledge is everything, and understanding more, makes us less hesitant to adapt to changes, let’s attempt to bring all the pieces together and look at a working example of a Strategic Reward System with getWaiter! embedded as an insight metric.
We want to put a twist into the existing textbook ideas, to broaden and correct our perception of the difficulty level required to implement a Strategic Reward System. The aim is to simply reenergize our knowledge of all the necessary stages required for the tool to work whilst taking notice of the correlation paired with the Employee Value Proposition.
Key Terminology
For the purpose of this particular example, we will assume the following key terminology:
- Performance Management – continuing process of monitoring, controlling and responding to the employee service performance.
- Key Performance Indicator (KPI)– a measurable quantitative and qualitative metric used to evaluate upon the set employee performance standards.
- getWaiter! – a customer experience tracking tool that provides actionable insight analytics used against the set KPI’s.
- Recognition – acknowledgment of the expected employment reward, AND identifying situations which call for a possibly non-contract binding appreciation.
- Appreciation – a call to action, showing the extent of gratitude and return on the invested effort for the performance achieved.
- Incentive Scheme – a reward offering that motivates employment.
- Rewards Scheme – a reward offering that stimulates the employees to show outstanding performance.
Strategic Reward System: A working example
Let’s break into a working scenario where we can imagine the above terms taking action whilst having the getWaiter! system on site. The small scale of this learning exercise can be applied to a whole restaurant chain nevertheless.
Assuming that you already have a solid workforce in your restaurant, we can put the essential recognition for the Incentive Scheme to one side. Our Strategic Reward System starts with monitoring of our current service performance. Restaurant managers therefore have a full accessibility to insight analytics and live feedback data. This allows them to maintain a continuous control over the customer experience given, and therefore have the opportunity to respond to any dips or highlights in performance. In other words, with a set of the Key Performance Indicators reflecting the businesses objectives they can now establish using the getWaiter! metrics the true level of their employees performance.
You will notice from the diagram above that, the breakeven point for the Employee Value Proposition begins with the employer’s stage of recognition and the getWaiter! system. Having access to all sorts of valuable data is only half the job when you are not using it to it’s full potential. The second stage of our Strategic Reward System therefore, is the actual reward part. And here there is no rule, yet a mere suggestion of how that may be executed. Depending on individual business’s values and ethos different methods of rewards and incentives should be executed to encourage the workforce to drive operational excellence.
This really isn’t rocket science. Having an easy and accountable system to implement such as getWaiter! to have access to metrics used to set Key Performance Indicators is half of your successful change. Having the will to recognize and appreciate your staff with rewards that you are capable of providing is the other half. Putting the two together, you have a great recipe for increased Staff Retention.
