Employers are facing challenges with hiring, retention, and engagement unlike ever before. The Great Resignation is here, and it is real — the U.S. Department of Labor reports that between April and June this year a total of 11.5 million workers quit their jobs. Millennials, who now account for more than ⅓ of the workforce, cite three key reasons why they are leaving their jobs:
- Dissatisfaction with pay or financial rewards
- Not enough opportunities for advancement
- Not feeling appreciated
That’s right. Two out of three of the top reasons millennials are leaving have to do with incentives or compensation.
Along with staying appropriately staffed, many HR departments must also manage ways to keep both remote and hybrid employees at a scale not previously anticipated. These shifting workplace trends highlight many of the ongoing challenges HR departments face even before work trends and expectations suddenly shifted in 2020.
Employee engagement, retention, recruitment, and culture management are consistently four of the biggest challenges for HR departments, which are now amplified due to the current employment climate. With growing numbers of remote workers and increased concern over personal space as well as health and safety, many small, less conventional office perks such as pingpong, video games, and even happy hours are much less attractive than they’ve been in the past.
But this trend isn’t only brought on by the current climate — a recent FastCompany article reports “…a new study finds that these snazzy office benefits aren’t what young workers really want. Instead, workers younger than 35 place more value on respect.” Respect can look like a number of different things — training opportunities, management learning about the team and individual interest, and even simply small tokens of appreciation.
The good news is that one of the most common tools utilized to show appreciation, can actually be used to support many of these new challenges and HR driven initiatives: gift cards.
Gift cards can be used for:
- Welcoming and onboarding new hires
- Showing appreciation for onsite staff and remote team members
- Incentivizing referrals
- To support further education and skill development
According to the Incentive Research Foundation, over 70% of employees agree that gift cards are either the best or good rewards to receive. This is likely because of the wide variety of gift cards available and because they give the employee power to get what they want, without being taxed. Beyond the demand driven by the B2B and incentive space, larger consumer trends have spurred many rising ecommerce brands and service providers to develop their own gift card.
This means there is a much more diverse array of offerings than ever before — giving an employee a gift card doesn’t have to mean giving them something from a national chain or big box store. In fact, it doesn’t even have to mean giving them a gift card for products, it may mean they have the opportunity to try a new food delivery service or even sign up for an educational community to learn something new.
The increased diversity of gift card offerings may initially seem overwhelming, but it’s important to remember that many B2B and employee incentive platforms offer gift card portals that can allow the employee to choose and make the selection and delivery of the gift card easy and secure.
At Prizeout, we offer employers the ability to run a meaningful, accessible employee rewards program at no additional cost, which can help reduce the workload for the HR team and make the most of any incentives budget.
To find out more about what Prizeout’s rewards platform can do for your company, reach out to us at inquiries@prizeout.com.
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