Developing good habits in employees and motivating them to do their best isn't easy. Thanks to the work time management software you can keep your employees engaged and reward them with attractive prices at little to no extra costs.

Modern time tracking and leave management software as Calamari give admins many convenient features that can be used to create competitions and games for employees. They are also the best possible tools to reward employees with attractive benefits – like extra free days, longer breaks, or shorter work time on a given day.

In this article, you'll find out what kind of rewards you can offer employees and how to implement this solution with HR management software like Calamari.

How to use HR management tools to motivate employees – work time rewards

Additional day-off, fewer hours of work on Monday or Friday, longer break – those are very attractive rewards, especially at the end of the quarters and after a long time without vacation, when they feel tired.

In this hard time, a good motivator is what both employees and employers need. People, of course, need some reward for their hard work at the end of the quarter and their employers need them to do their best a little longer. That's when every extra hour of resting sounds sweet.

Reward for work performance

One of the benefits employers can offer their subordinates, are extra free days, hours to take when they need them, or paying employees for additional time spent at work.

To get the day off, employees need to do something that gives better than usually expected results. It can't be something easy and available to achieve for everyone. A great prize needs to come with great performance.

It is possible to reward employees for their sales results, attitude, punctuality, great contact with customers, or anything else you want your employees to focus on improving. The best of them will get the main prize – an extra day off.

To make sure that all the rewards will be given to the right people and they won't be forgotten, you can create a new type of absences in the Calamari admin panel. You can name it "reward for..." and when someone wins the prize, you can give them an extra day as a +1 to their "rewards day-off" limits.

Next, you have to create the table when you write down the winners of the games you created. After announcing the lucky ones, you can give them their reward in Calamari.

Our vacation tracker allows creating an absence type for a whole day, half of it, and for a chosen number of hours thanks to which it's easy to set the reward of the exact length you want.

It's a great way not only to motivate employees but also to help them in developing good habits like punctuality, efficiency at work, limit or quit smoking, being more positive, exercise and so on.

free-trial-2

Gamification

The possibilities of gaining new levels, getting prizes, collecting experiences, and developing new skills – are all well known from games, mostly PC, iOS, and Android ones, these days. It turned out that using those games' mechanics in companies can be an effective method of motivating employees.

The name "gamification" was first used in 2008 by Brett Terrill. Since then, the system has proved its usability and is developing to be more and more efficient.

The main motivator is the points system. The more points, the higher level of experience, new skills, challenges and what's most important – better prizes. It's also a convenient way for employees to track their work performance on their own. Seeing the exp bar closer and closer to the end, it's easier to force yourself to do something, even if you're tired, have a headache, or just want to go home to easy ice-creams while watching a new episode of Netflix's series.

Gamification makes both: external and internal motivation grow!

Constantly evolving gamification trend is becoming more and more popular. In 2015, according to Markets andMarkets company's research, the gamification market was priced at $1,65 billion. In 2020 its price was already $9,1 billion. Specialists estimate that gamification market price will be $30 billion at the end of 2025.

If you have a vacation tracker and time registering tools in your company, you can create simple gamification based on work time-related data. It will give you a chance to see if gamification is the right way for your organization without investing in fancy new software.

Using Calamari to create simple gamification to motivate employees won't replace the solid gamification tools but can be a good sample of the effects you can get.

Examples of rewarding employees using time tracking software

Knowing that motivating employees with prizes can give nice results, it's worth using time tracking software to do so. In exchange for good results, punctuality, and other actions that companies encourage them to do, employees can get attractive prizes thanks to the Calamari work time tracking tool.

Working time benefits as rewards

You can ensure employees have various kinds of rewards like additional hours and days off or remote work for their work performance and also for developing good healthy habits that your organization approves.

Reward for limiting or quitting smoking

Smoke-breaks seem harmless – it's only 5 minutes – someone may say. But those 5 minutes a few times a day can give over 40 minutes of additional break not counted in the work time. That means it's over a half of an hour when your employees aren't working as they should. Yearly, employees who smoke cost companies additional $5,000.

Usually, employees smoke about 10 cigarettes during the workday. Limiting this number is then a benefit for employee's health and the company's efficiency.

A great solution to fight a smoking habit (or worse – addition) that motivates people to make this change in their lives, can be a shorter workday. You can make it on Monday mornings or Friday evenings but only for those employees who stopped smoking during work hours.

In Calamari, you can set the shorter workday in the admin panel for chosen employees. As an admin, you can always add or remove people from this additional work schedule, so you can use it to reward a healthy lifestyle in your organization with ease.

Punctuality bonus

Another time-stealing in the usual workflow is the tardiness problem. It's very common for employees to be 5-10 minutes late, sometimes even longer, and a few times a week. Every 5 minutes of lateness a day gives another 25 minutes of lost work.

You can try fighting with tardiness in many ways – with a joke, by adding employees extra work hours for the time they lost or by motivating them to get better to have more free time.

Giving the most punctual employees the additional time for a break during the day is a great way to fight with lost time and at the same time, it has a good influence on employees' morale.

When some people get to work late, others make their morning ritual before actually starting their work, which lasts about 5-10 minutes. But with a chance to get a prize for being punctual, there's no one to act unfair, therefore there's no one to feel cheated.

To find out which of the employees is the most punctual, you can use Calamari's monthly reports with detailed info about work time. By filtering the report, finding the winner is a piece of cake.

Additional time-off for great achievements

The prize must fit the work that has to be done to get it. So the better the achievement, the higher the prize. That's why the best prizes should wait for the unusual work performance.

That is why the employee with the most outstanding results – extremely high sales results, winning a valuable contract, conducting an effective marketing campaign, or creating an extraordinary product – should get the most outstanding reward. And the higher the price is, the more people try harder to get it.

This special reward can be the additional leave day from the special day-offs limit called "prizes". You can create a specific type of absence for every challenge or use the same one for all of them.

Winners should be announced at the All Hands Meeting in the office, so except for the prize itself, the winner can get the recognition, fame, and gratulations they deserved. Being recognized for a good job is a great motivation itself.

free-tria-1

Help in finding abuses, the best, and the worst results

Calamari makes it easy to collect archive data about the work time of employees – their lateness and worked hours included. In the report that can be easily generated from the administration panel, you can find the number of hours worked each day, time spent on working over given projects, break time, lateness, overtime, and other information connected to the working time.

Thanks to the report, you will quickly find people with the best and the worst results. It's simple as creating a new absence type to give some free time to the best performing employees.

Gamification with time and vacation tracker

Time tracking software collects data about the hour of starting and ending the workday. They also register the beginning and the end of every break employee calls during the day.

In Calamari, you can track time over projects to get even and set challenges according to the expected results. HR management tools can be used to create simple gamification that will help you encourage subordinates to develop good, healthy habits which help them in being more productive and less tired during the day.

New habits equal more points, higher levels, and better prizes in more challenging tasks to do. Additional hours and days off are very attractive for employees and organizations can benefit from this motivating system. Creating simple gamification based on Calamari and Excel sheets will only take a few minutes and can significantly limit the time-loss due to lateness, smoke breaks, and other reasons.

Summary

Effective increasing employees' productivity and engagement requires identifying the most effective motivators and its skillful implementation. Thanks to Calamari, you will take care of the quality of work time records and vacation tracking. Also, with a bit of creativity, you can create simple gamification to motivate employees.

Find out how much your organization can get from an HR management tool like Calamari or contacts us if you have other questions.

free-trial-3a

The tool is one, but the benefits are endless.

Read more our texts about Motivating employees

Read more our texts about Remote work, outsourcing and offshoring

HR knowledge in your inbox

Get monthly insights and make HR simple with us

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
We use cookies to make our site work and also for analytics and advertising purposes. You can enable or disable optional cookies as desired. See our Privacy Policy for more details.