How to build a staff rewards calendar

How to build a staff rewards calendar

Tips on how to build a staff rewards calendar

A staff rewards calendar is a great way to energise your workplace.

Typically its comprises of a series of different events and activities that are pre-planned for the month ahead.

It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, in fact, a lot of the best fun days won’t cost you a cent!

But just publishing a staff rewards calendar and sticking it on your wall or intranet doesn’t ensure success.

In my experience, there are few critical components to ensuring your activity days will be a success.

7 critical components to ensure your staff rewards calendar is a success:

1. Leaders must lead by example

Nothing worse than all the staff making an effort and the leaders of the business just treating it like any another day and not getting involved.

I’ve seen plenty of call centres have a dress-up day where the managers somehow feel they are exempt – not good enough!

2. Provide sufficient notice

Publish your calendar in advance – this shouldn’t be something you do as a last-minute idea.

Give people sufficient notice so they have something to look forward to and can adequately prepare whether it be food, clothing etc.

Email staff reminders of tomorrows events and ensure Team Leaders remind their teams etc to make sure everyone is involved.

And don’t forget to let people know who are returning from leave.

3. Reward the staff that make the extra effort

You don’t want to be the only one sitting there with crazy hair and makeup when no one else in your team has bothered.

By having a best-dressed award, best team award etc it rewards those who make the extra effort and if applied consistently, will ensure each event has high participation.

4. Don’t cancel the day’s events because it’s busy

Yes, we know that’s hard sometimes.

If you haven’t used it yet, try our Call Centre Calculator so you can determine how many staff you need to answer calls and meet your service levels.

It uses the Erlang formula so you can plan activities to have the least amount of impact.

5. Allow sufficient budget

You can use as little or as much as you need but to ensure you can conduct the activities when planning months and years ahead, make sure you allow for somefunds in your annual budget.

6. Choose the dates for activities wisely

By aligning some of your activities with traditionally high absenteeism rates e.g. Fridays you may find that the sick leave on these days is reduced.

7. Delegate!

It’s not always up to the manager or team leader to organise everything.

Set up a Rewards Calendar committee, allocate activities by month to each team, delegate to the 2IC, give one of your good performers the opportunity to coordinate it.

There are lots of options – so no excuses!

What sort of events are good to include on a staff rewards calendar?

In no particular order we’ve listed a few of the common ones:

  • Anything food related! It could be bring a plate day, international food day, favourite snacks day etc
  • Role swapping! Ah, don’t you just love it when the boss serves you coffee all day!
  • Clothing related: Favourite footy colours, a particular colour, theme etc. Often linked to events happening in your community/country
  • Activities: Floor bingo, handball competitions, two-up, office basketball etc
  • Health-related: Massages, health checks, yoga/stretching sessions, meditation sessions
  • Other: bring a pet to work day, crazy hair/hat day

So good luck planning your staff rewards calendar and if you have either other ideas please share them around!

I’ve also provided an example below of one the Australian Unity call centre has used (thanks guys for sending it in!).

Australian Unity Rewards Calendar example
An example of the March 2016 Rewards Calendar at Australian Unity’s contact centre.

There are lots of templates you can find for free on the internet to create your staff rewards calendar but if you can’t be bothered looking here’s one to get you started. 

Recommended further reading: 3 Free ways to reward your call centre team 

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