High-Value Non-Financial Benefits for High Performers

As a business owner, team leader or manager, one of your biggest responsibilities is employee retention and especially retaining high performers. The simple answer to rewarding high performers are pay raises, bigger bonus structures or even share options. However, not every company is in the same financial situation to offer these rewards, so they chose to forgo any rewards at all. In doing so, we believe that is a sure-fire way to lose those high performers.

Employee happiness is a big focus in 2024, research from Oxford Sa?d Business School has found happy workers are 13% more productive (Bellet, C., De Neve, J-E., & Ward, G, Does (2019). Happiness have an Impact on Productivity? Sa?d Business School WP 2019–13). Other research suggests 92% of workers are more likely to repeat a specific action after receiving recognition for it. How do you keep employees happy? Reward their hard work! These studies should be emphasising the need for rewarding your high performers as it will not only keep them around but encourage them to break more ground and achieve even more.

So, if pay raises, better bonuses or stock options aren’t on the table, what can you do to increase employee happiness and reward those high achievers? Here are our top suggestions:

Work from Home Arrangements – Less commute means more productivity!

The post-COVID world has shown both increases and decreases in employees wanting WFH arrangements. What we have found is that the statistics speak for themselves and WFH is a great benefit to both employees and productivity. A two-year study from Great Place To Work, with more than 800,000 employees at Fortune 500 companies, found stable or increased productivity levels working from home. Prodoscore research has reported a 47% increase in productivity and studies from ergotron found that 40% of employees worked longer hours when WFH. It can be daunting for managers to trust their employees when working from home, but the statistics speak for themselves. Who wouldn’t want their best performers working longer and more productive hours? Being able to offer a high performer an extra day of WFH can be a fantastic incentive for them to stay with your company and even encourage other workers to rise to that high performer level. It won’t negatively impact your budget and it will create more productivity; we see that as an absolute win-win.

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Recognition – It’s not just about a raise, it’s about praise!

As a manager or executive, you should find it very concerning that research from GALLUP indicates only one in three workers strongly agree that they received recognition or praise for doing good work in the past seven days. Great Place to Work analysed 1.7 million employee survey responses and found the most important driver of great work is being recognised. A deeper look at the data shows 30% more employees selected “Recognise me” over “Pay me more” when it came to what drives great work. These statistics should be liquid gold to any manager or executive, you don’t need to be looking at only financial incentives, you should be looking at recognition! Consider CC’ing other leaders within the business when recognising the great work of your employees, mention their achievements at your weekly or monthly team meetings and encourage senior staff to congratulate those employees on their success. If an employee is doing great work, they should feel like it is being noticed within the business and not just by their team leader, but leaders within the business.

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Rostered Day Off – Not annual leave, this one’s on the house!

At Hinchen Recruitment Group, we’re a big believer in creating incentives for our initiatives. We’ve found that one of the best rewards to incentive employees is an extra rostered day off to be used whenever they like. This single day adds so much value and can turn a difficult week into a much-needed long weekend to reset and recharge. The important thing to note is that this incentive isn’t annual leave, it is separate. Your high performers will greatly appreciate an extra day to spend time with their kids, finally get around to cleaning up their homes or even relaxing by the pool. ?Whatever they want to do with it is up to them, but it will not only reward their hard work but encourage them to exceed their targets and get another day off!

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There are so many other options for non-financial employee benefits such as free on-site parking, gifted holidays between Christmas and New Years, professional development/mentoring programs, accredited course work or upskill opportunities and more. If you’re wanting advice on how you can increase employee happiness and reward your high performers, reach out to our expert consultants today: https://www.hinchen.com.au/

Kelly Pike Frank Van West Louisa Hinchen - MBA

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