Human Resources – Rewards Systems (6 of 10)

Human Resources specialist would be designing the compensation and benefits package to attract, retain and motivate employees to give their best. This is not enough especially in East Asia. We always emphasize that we need to give recognition and rewards to our Human Resource – the employees.

Human Resource manager would issue appraisal for awarding performance increment once a year. Would you think this is able to motivate employees? Wherever possible we would hope that Human Resource would create monthly recognition or quarterly rewards.

You and I recognize that some employers start practicing “employee of the month”, “most courteous employee of the month”, “most enlighten service staff of the month” and so on. Why do we need the Human Resource to do a monthly recognition program? Monthly program would help us to gain momentum and freeze the desired behaviour.Then is there any other reward that could be of quarterly or half yearly? We generally would look at the nature of business. If you are in the manufacturing environment, we would promote quarterly quality measure. Human Resource could design jointly with production on the yield. Similarly Human Resource gets input from Warehouse if they are in the logistic business. The service department can offer specific indicators to measure the contribution of their staff to Human Resource for designing rewards.

Rewards can be monetary and non-monetary. Human Resource must budget from the outcome of the business unit. This extra investment on our people – our Human Resources is crucial. When yield hits the target, the cost per unit is lower. The gain from the costing shall be used as reward sum. So there is not extra cost incurred. Human Resource manager should highlight to the Finance.

Human Resource prefers to give non-monetary rewards – trip or tour, day off, token of appreciation, a free meal, breakfast with CEO, letter of appreciation or dinner at a posh restaurant. This can be creative and the cost is not fixed. So Human Resource specialist can base on the gain to decide. They feel fantastic being empowered to decide the rewards.

This is a win-win-win approach. The company benefited, the employees motivated and the creativity goes to the Human Resource.

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