To encourage job satisfaction throughout the office, Matthew J. Bower, administrator at Luhrsen Law Group in Sarasota, surveyed staff to find out what specific types of rewards they wanted to see in their jobs.
The firm had always given rewards, and they ran the gamut from plaques to cash to time off to gift certificates. But over the years, what Bower found was that the traditional things got old. “They became expectations instead of actual rewards.”
So he gave staff a list of all the rewards the firm was handing out and asked them to choose the three they would most enjoy receiving. He asked that they then rank those three in order of preference and describe what they liked and didn’t like about each one and what could make the rewards more attractive.
Staff members were also asked what other rewards they would like to receive.
Related reading: 17 benefits that employees like and the firm can afford
Bower asked that the answers had to be specific, explaining that “vague responses won’t help me help you.”
With gift certificates, for example, he wanted to know what types they liked. With event rewards, he wanted to get preferences, such as tickets to a ball game or time at a spa. With recognition, he wanted to know whether people liked certificates or announcements in front of everybody or special training.
Some eye-opening answers
The answers said a lot.
One person, for example, said time off was a good reward, but it would be best to give Friday or Monday off and thereby give somebody a long and relaxing weekend.
A new attorney said he wanted time off to take his wife on the honeymoon they had never had.
But perhaps most enlightening, Bower says, was learning that management had lost sight of what had once appealed to employees. One staffer, for example, said she wanted the firm to reinstate a practice it had followed in the past but had dropped. Previously, the attorneys and Bower had taken one staffer to lunch at random each month. “It’s something I didn’t think about,” he says. “To me it was no big deal.” But the staffer listed that as her top preference.
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