This article first appeared in Reward & Benefits Today.

According to motivation experts, peer-to-peer reward schemes can help boost morale in the workplace. How can you ensure employees buy into the idea?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some employees find peer-to-peer reward schemes a bit naff. One ex-employee of an American-owned publishing company, for example, says being practically forced to nominate a colleague for ‘good behaviour’ once a month made the whole thing a bit of a farce. So why bother running such a scheme, and how can you ensure it’s not a waste of money?

A peer-to-peer reward scheme involves employees nominating their fellow colleagues for exceptional work. Managers usually then look at the nominations – often once a month – and decide who should receive an award by judging the nominated achievement against set behaviours the company wants to promote.[...]

Peer-to-peer reward schemes are particularly good for recognising achievement in back-office roles, such as accounting or HR, where performance is not as easily measured as in departments such as sales.

The other benefit, [...] is that the performance expected by a colleague to warrant a nomination is often much higher than could be demanded by management.

Sheila Sheldon, director of European operations at Michael C Fina, agrees:

“You can pull the wool over your boss’s eyes, but you can’t pull the wool over your peers’ eyes. Sometimes management is so close to the coalface that they don’t always see the true performers, but the peer group will know who is working and who isn’t.”

Incentives

Sheldon believes that for a peer-to-peer scheme to work, management buy-in is required from the start, and adds that she has never seen an issue with employee participation where a scheme is constructed and promoted properly. Where employees are reluctant to nominate their colleagues, Baker says that involvement can sometimes be encouraged by rewarding employees who do make nominations.[...]

“One of the easiest ways to kill a peer-to-peer reward programme is if you have a fixed budget,” he explains. “You don’t ever want to be in a position where you have two people who have done exactly the same thing, but you can only afford to reward one of them, because then your reward scheme has become a lottery.”

Budgets

Budgeting for every employee to get one award per quarter is sensible, and that the prize awarded should be enough for the employee to buy something without an additional contribution.

Sheldon agrees that £20 is a good starting point.”We currently [run schemes with] rewards from as low as £10 up to £1,000. You are better off rewarding an individual two or three times a year and giving them £25 a time,” she says.

So while some staff might see a peer-to-peer reward scheme as a bit silly on the face of it, with the right investment, planning and promotion, and by measuring performance against set criteria, organisations should find that their investment pays off.

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