- 1). Identify outstanding ideas by conducting brainstorming meetings, conducting personal interviews or distributing an online survey to collect input. Find out what people want to receive as rewards, such as candy, free snacks, formal certificates, apparel with your company logo, pens, coffee mugs, movie tickets, gift cards to popular restaurants or other relatively inexpensive incentives.
- 2). Reward the ideas that have the most benefit to your company with larger-scale events. Projects with high impact and low effort tend to provide the most return on investment. Schedule an outing to a local restaurant, park or amusement center to celebrate these events. Projects that have high impact but require high effort tend to take a longer period of time to finish. Schedule a conference or retreat at an exotic location, such as an island retreat or ocean liner cruise, to reward these types of outstanding ideas. Typically, exemplary employees get to invite a guest or family members to accompany them on these types of trips that reward outstanding performance or ideas contributed on the job.
- 3). Conduct award ceremonies to recognize these individuals and motivate other employees to contribute ideas that help your company meet its strategic goals, too. Schedule monthly, quarterly or annual meetings to award certificates, cash or other prizes to deserving employees. Describe the outstanding ideas so everyone knows what types of ideas merit these awards.
- 4). Recognize employees who contribute outstanding ideas in written form. List their names and ideas in company literature, newsletters and on company intranet sites. Cite the idea, implementation plans and details about the individual contributing the idea, such as department, job title and years of service. Annually, publish a brochure that describes all the outstanding ideas contributed by people in your company.
- 5). Encourage everyone to participate by promoting the program through the use of social media technology such as wikis, blogs and forums. Create posters, fliers and brochures to solicit ideas and recognize employees with outstanding ideas. Motivate employees to generate these ideas so you can reward them. For example, set up a system that allows employees to accumulate points throughout the year. Then, reward people with the highest number of points by giving out sweatshirts, T-shirts or jackets with the company logo.
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