How to Get Your Employees Motivated

"Envelope Extravaganza" is a strategy I devised while managing a small retail store several years ago. I needed my staff to stop simply going through the motions and start being better producers. Since positive reinforcement always proves to work better than negative reinforcement, I knew I had to come up with a way to reward them for being productive and motivate them to do so. As their leader, it was my job to do this and motivational speeches only worked for a day or two. So, "Envelope Extravaganza" was born! It's almost like a game (although that was not the original intention) and it had results far beyond what I had expected. It will cost you a little bit of money (not much), but if you get bonus pay based on sales, I promise you'll get back what you put into it.

Decide how many envelopes you need. About 10 per employee you have is a great number and makes things more fun. Number each envelope. Don't seal them closed because you want to be able to reuse them. Set a goal for each employee based on whatever you want. At the end of the week, if the goal is reached they get to pick a number. You give them that envelope to open and they receive whatever is in that envelope. It could be something great. It could be something small, or it could be nothing important at all. You want to keep the number of envelopes that have "not so good" prizes to a minimum. But, you do want these because the game is like a lottery.

There should be one really big prize. Don't change the prizes in the envelopes. Keep them as you had originally stuffed them, but replace the ones that were used immediately with something else. You tell the employees that there is one envelope with a big prize in it. Tell them what it is. It could be a $50 gift certificate to a restaurant, theme park tickets, $50 bill. Use whatever big prize you think is big enough for the type of business you are running. Of course, if you only have 20 envelopes, the chances of hitting the big prize are high. So, you want a lot of envelopes because it makes the game more interesting. You'll see why later.

Examples of what you can include are scratch tickets ranging in value from $1.00 - $5.00, a pass for an employee to leave work 30 minutes early with pay, $5 to McDonalds or Dunkin' Donuts, make your own schedule, movie tickets, wear jeans to work a day, a coupon for a free burger. Anything. I included a "Not it!" card. This was an index card they could keep until they wanted to use it. They could use it to assign one of their duties to me. It went over really well. This is a great idea if you're looking to keep the cost down. Get creative with what you can put in there. For example, if you have a store in a mall and you frequent a pretzel or cinnamon bun place where you get a punch card for every item you buy, making the 10th one free you can use that. Instead of cashing it in yourself, put that in the envelope to reward an employee. Get creative. You also need things that are pointless. But, only a few. I'd say less than 5% should be pointless but funny. You can include a $500 Monopoly bill or a funny photo.

The results are amazing. You may find employees making deals with each other by saying, "If I get the big prize, I'll split with you and if you get it, you'll split with me" or, "We'll go out to dinner together with the gift certificate". You may even get an employee wanting to share the dinner with you as thanks! They'll even think of methods to narrow down what envelope the think the good prize is in and ask you what's already been picked. What's fun is not telling them. They have to figure it out on their own or together. So, it's also a great way to get them to work together. You may even find opposite results. People may keep their own tally and not share information or even lie about what envelopes had what. This is impossible of course if they open it up in front of each other. But, that's where your creativity comes in.

Your employees will be motivated to want to open an envelope every week. Sales will climb, productivity will increase and your employees will be happy that they work for such an awesome boss!