How well people work is a direct result of why they work.
This may sound simple enough, but it’s more complex than you think. While employees crave flexibility, they have never felt lonelier or more disconnected. Employees want to perform well, but rarely receive the feedback needed to grow.
Our motivations for showing up and doing good work have changed. It’s up to People teams and company leaders to get out of the habit of using old strategies to address these new challenges. They need to understand how to motivate employees so they can do their best work.
How to motivate employees with Bonusly
Employees aren’t motivated by anniversary plaques and a “meets expectations” rating during their annual review cycle. Money doesn’t motivate either. So what does?
Employees are motivated by meaningful work. They want to work at a company where they feel like they belong and are appreciated for their contributions and connected to their teammates.
Bonusly motivates employees in four key areas:
- Building a sense of belonging from day one, no matter where they work
- Organically creating opportunities for connection and collaboration
- Consistently setting expectations and reinforcing great work
- Elevating recognition with meaningful rewards
Here’s how it all works.
Celebrating key moments and milestones
Acknowledging and celebrating an employee's anniversary is a small action that makes a big difference. But when you’re a company of 50, let alone 5,000, that small action becomes pretty cumbersome for HR teams.
That’s where Bonusly comes in. Automated milestones enable HR teams to stay on top of key moments while ensuring employees create a sense of belonging from day one.
Important dates—work anniversaries, birthdays, and first days—are automatically highlighted in the Bonusly recognition feed with a set amount of redeemable points. Everyone across the organization can see the milestone and add to the celebration.
Let’s bring you back to your first day of work, but in this scenario, your company uses Bonusly. You’re nervous: it’s a fully remote job, so you’re wondering how it’s going to feel meeting and connecting with others across Zoom screens and Slack messages. You log in to your Bonusly account and are flooded with personalized welcome notes from new teammates. It’s only been a few hours on the new job, and you already feel like you belong.
.webp)
Even better—the welcome wishes continue to flood in throughout the week. Bonusly’s Celebrations widget keeps track of those key milestones, so if anyone misses your special day, they have all month to catch up and celebrate with you. (We love a good month-long birthday celebration!)
Building connections with peer-to-peer recognition
Bonusly’s peer-to-peer recognition solution is a powerful motivator. Here’s how it works: Employees open up a recognition box and tag a coworker they want to celebrate. They write a note about why they’re recognizing them and can attach a GIF, a core value, and a certain amount of redeemable points. Similar to automated milestones, everyone in the organization can see the recognition in their feed and add their own comments and points.
Bonusly integrates into existing tools, like Slack and Teams, so when a teammate encounters a win, they can deliver recognition in seconds—recognizing coworkers as the work unfolds, not in a peer-review cycle six months later.
This simple but powerful act of giving recognition creates connections across your team. It also gives employees a clear understanding of what is happening across the company and underscores the broader impact of their work. This builds a better sense of belonging, leading to everyone feeling more connected and engaged at work.
Have you ever felt like you accomplished something big and got a few thumbs-up emojis in Slack, a “great job!” in your morning standup, or even worse: radio silence? Bonusly solves the problem of hard work going unnoticed. Your teammates can head to their recognition feed and send you a shoutout for your work.
With Bonusly, your team can start a powerful ripple effect: others in the company can see recognition and add on, from their perspective, how and why your work matters.
Shoutouts and stories that drive results
Scrolling through the Bonusly recognition feed also helps your team understand what skills their colleagues value. Not only does recognition make you feel good—but it also makes you want to do good. This approach helps new hires understand what “good” looks like and have a better understanding of the skills, behaviors, and outcomes the company values most.
Here’s an example: say you’re a nervous public speaker, and you’ve been prepping for a big presentation at your company all hands. The presentation goes better than you could have imagined. Many of your peers and leaders recognize you for how the presentation went—your delivery, key points, and the clarity you brought to the greater team. That positive recognition helps you hone specific public speaking skills and motivates you to continue to practice and improve.
What's more: every piece of recognition can be tied to a company core value. Doing so helps to illustrate what that core value looks like in real life.
Let’s use another example: One of Bonusly’s values is to “raise the bar.” While it’s easy to understand what that means in basic terms, our employees can filter recognition by that specific value and see examples of how their peers exceed expectations daily.
This not only makes core values more visible, but it also gives employees great examples of how they too can exceed expectations—motivating them to bring home some big wins.
Rewards employees really, really want
We’d be remiss to leave out the impact employee rewards can have on employee motivation. Bonusly’s global rewards catalog has 1,200 gift card options in over 200 countries, plus options to donate points to charity or redeem points for cold hard cash. Rewards that are aligned with employee preferences and needs are rewards that drive motivation and make people feel a deeper sense of connection to their company.
Plus, elements of your company culture can be integrated into the Bonusly reward experience. Organizations can create exclusive rewards (think: virtual lunch with your CEO, company swag, or an app subscription to improve your health) to create an employee experience that aligns with their broader organizational cultures.
At Bonusly, for instance, we launched a custom reward to donate to the Brazil Foundation, which provides aid in the Rio Grande do Sul region of Brazil that has been devastated by flooding. One of our team members has family in this region, and a core part of our culture is that we support one another, inside and outside of work.
The takeaway
A new way of working is here, and company leaders must rethink how to drive employee motivation if they want to also drive results. Employees want to feel like they belong no matter where they work. They want to feel connected to the company mission and their teammates. And they want to know that their work is making a difference.
If you’re ready to build a company culture that motivates employees daily across every level of your organization, get started today with Bonusly.
