Promotional Products Make Internal Promotions Thrive!
To increase business and boost the bottom line, many companies focus their attention and efforts on wooing clients and customers. Unfortunately, too many company heads frequently ignore a very important group who really make a difference in the profitability of the business -- their employees.
The rewards or recognition do not have to be expensive or extravagant to make employees more satisfied and work harder. According to recent surveys, incentive programs, especially those incorporating promotional products, can improve productivity and increase attendance and loyalty.
For example, research from Baylor University found employees try harder when awards/incentives are awarded as part of an internal company program. The survey revealed that employees appreciate the awards/incentives they receive and encourage each other to work toward the "prizes" to help realize the company's goals.
Promotional products add extra punch to a variety of internal programs. Here are a few examples:
- Combatting Absenteeism
- Employee absenteeism is a real strain on many companies' profits due to lost productivity and opportunities. To counteract this and motivate employees not to miss work, one company started a program that awarded employees who didn't miss a day of work for two months with a long-distance calling card with free minutes. And, for every consecutive 30 days of work not missed, 10 additional free minutes were added to the calling card.
- Improving Communication
- As the saying goes, little things mean a lot. One manufacturing company took this credo to heart in its efforts to continually improve communication to its employees. In late December, the company's president included a little something extra in his employees' bonus cheque envelopes; a calendar card that highlighted all of the company's vacation days.
- Event Marketing
- This might be a client golf outing, industry awards banquet, grand opening, building dedication, open house or anniversary, or you may be sponsoring or co-sponsoring a sporting event, concert, etc. Promotional products serve as thank-you gifts, media attention-getting devices and so on.
- Emphasizing Safety
- Employee safety programs are one of the most common internal promotions conducted by companies in a variety of industries. As part of its safety program, a large manufacturing company's wanted to raise safety consciousness by motivating employees to attend and participate in safety meetings. So, the company imprinted the meeting topics on useful items, such as a ruler depicting safe and unsafe work practices, and distributed them with training manuals at the monthly safety meetings. As a result of these efforts, the plant's OSHA recordable incidence rate plummeted from 8.97 to 1.41. The senior safety engineer credits much of the improvement to the safety awareness program.
- Cause-Related Marketing
- From the "fur is not a fabric" movement to promoting breast cancer awareness, cause-oriented groups, organizations and charities use promotional products to promote their message, and many companies will support those causes or market their own products and services through them.
- Fund Raising
- From libraries to charitable organizations, fund raising is often a huge undertaking that can last anywhere from a few months to an entire year or be ongoing.
- Motivation/Incentives
- Imprinted products are often used to motivate sales teams toward more sales, production workers toward greater efficiency, credit departments toward more collections, etc. But they can also be used as incentives to get store managers to give you better shelf space for your products, dealers to load up on your product so they actually have to push it, consumers to purchase more of your product, delinquent library-card holders to return books and so on.
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