Short blogs Archives | Page 7 of 17

Fire up your sales team for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

November 19, 2020/in Short blogs /by Love2shop

We expect you’ve got all your plans in place for your 2020 Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions.

The web wizards in SEO are ready for “Insert your product Black Friday” searches and the gazillion variations of that your customers will put into Google.

Your email team have set you up with a peach of an outbound campaign, and you’re expecting the phones to ring right off their hooks all day as the emails pour in.

There’s just one question left. How are you going to fire up your sales team to turn this Black Friday into your biggest one yet? We’ve got some ideas that won’t cost a fortune, take a look:

Day-of rewards

As we’ve said before, long-term incentive schemes can end up rewarding the same small group over and over.

Putting some exciting digital gift cards up for grabs on the day, when your whole team is focused on the same tasks at the same time, lets everyone into the game.

Of course, its best to reward people for hitting targets, but we’ve also found it really motivating to have rewards for ‘softer’ things such as Hero of the Day, Best team Player and even Gaff of the Week to really boost morale when things are extremely busy.

Reward the wins, big and small, through the day

Don’t wait until the Monday after to tell the story of your big Black Friday. Stay on top of your sales through the day and give your team regular updates and encouragement about their successes.

A big milestone might even be worth breaking out some digital rewards for the team. Having small rewards for things like the Lunchtime Legend and Afternoon Achiever gives people a little moment to look forward to.

Feed them

Literally! Some Uber Eats or Just Eat e-gift cards could make all the difference to their mindset on Black Friday, even when your staff are working from home. At the very least it’s one less thing to worry about.

Or, if you prefer to keep rewards in reserve, they’d make a great prize for a team passing an important sales milestone on the day, and it enables them to get together over Zoom (other platforms are available!) and celebrate their achievements together.

Recognise more than revenue

No matter how good your team is, there’s always an element of luck to inbound sales. One teammate picks up the phone to a £200 order, another picks up the phone to £2,000. Rewarding and recognising what your staff can’t control doesn’t motivate them.

In fact, things that look unfair, or just feel unfair, are demotivating. Celebrate your staff for what they can control – their application and effort to their tasks.

Make their efforts part of a bigger picture

Working without a bigger picture isn’t particularly satisfying. People feel much more empowered if they know ‘why’ they are working so hard. Knowing how their work affects other teams, and your company as a whole, motivates staff to excel.

Be sure to outline how a successful Black Friday would make a huge positive impact on not just your department, but the whole organisation.

Relax your procedures

If it’s at all possible, relax your rules and procedures for the day. Black Friday/Cyber Monday aren’t normal days, after all. If you’re looking for high-volume over a short time, you don’t want staff getting demoralised while caught in a queue to approve a quote or sale with the boss.

Trust and autonomy can motivate just as well as rewards in the circumstances (especially if those sales affect their commission….).

Celebrate team milestones

Focus on the whole team, not just individual performances. As we’ve mentioned before in this article, some of your staff will always perform better than others.

Sometimes that’s luck and sometimes that’s skill, but your department succeeds as a team regardless. Keeping a whole team motivated means recognising their achievements as a unit.

Highlight past achievements

Go back over what the team did well last year, or the year before, and pull out the big stories.

Phrase this as a narrative, as a story of how your teams come together to create success. Then present the upcoming Black Friday as an opportunity to define what the next chapter in that story looks like.

Reward the moment, but plan for the future

Remember, these aren’t long-term strategies. This is a sugar-rush, a dizzying surge to deal with one of the biggest days of the year. They’re no replacement for well-organised long-term incentive programmes, a great company culture, and investing in the development of your staff.

If you want to talk about any of that, or organise some rewards for the team this Black Friday, please do get in touch.

The crucial trick to motivating and engaging your remote teams

July 29, 2020/in Employee benefits, Employee engagement, Employee Motivation, Employee recognition, employee wellbeing, Employee wellness, Employees, Short blogs, Staff morale /by Love2shop

A year ago, a great deal of blog space was still being dedicated to pondering and postulating about home working. How will we scale security? Will employees be motivated at home? Will our company culture suffer? Will productivity take a nosedive?

A year later, those questions are going through a global stress test. According to YouGov, 38% of the pre-crisis workforce are now working at home. The interesting part is, they don’t particularly want to go back, either.

A massive majority of workers simply do not want to go back to the office full-time, according to some recent research by Okta. And that’s while the rest of the world slowly takes the shape of normality.

Eggs and flour are regular features on the supermarket shelves again, along with your favourite craft beer and wines. You can even pop out for a pint and see your friends in the park. But the country’s staff aren’t gagging to give up remote working.

What this tells us is that we’re past the point of adjusting to a crisis. The shock has passed, and most of us are pretty happy with this version of “normal,” at least when it comes to our work. That means it’s time to address one of the downsides of a remote workforce – isolation. Our company, Love2shop, have had to address this ourselves and find a way to make sure everyone’s engaged and motivated at home.

Not just the chat and banter, and the office friends. But the sense of camaraderie, company culture, and the feeling that we’re all contributing to something wider than the narrow furrows we plough. The one thing any company can, and should, do to combat the feeling that staff are plugging away in their own little world is communicate.

Communicate to engage a remote team

If it’s not too gauche to blow our own horn, Love2shop, have done a great job of handling the sudden dispersal of our teams. At group, department, and team levels, we have tactics to keep employees engaged and connected.

Group-level communications

Weekly round ups

Every week, Group and Human Resources put together a round-up of news and views from around the business and push it out to staff. That might include blogs written by people in our company, surveys to get opinions and feedback from staff about their work and their response to Group efforts, news on how the business is responding to COVID-19 developments, and any human resources developments that might affect staff.

Podcasts

Some of the leadership figures around Love2shop have been putting together podcasts talking about what’s happening in their corner of the Love2shop universe. That might be our senior leadership team fielding questions from the staff, our design managers talking about our latest product developments, or even just some stories of kindness to cheer everyone up.

Team/department-level

Meetings are not the word that fills everyone with the sense of thrill and wonder, we know. But we’re not trying to blow anyone’s socks off, we’re trying to keep everyone connected to each other.

Weekly meetings

Weekly meeting are where department-level discussions happen. They’re where we talk about what the individual teams that make up the wider departments are doing, what projects are being delivered, and how we’re performing as a division against our targets. We also run through news, introduce new hires, and talk about what’s happening at Group level and how it might affect our day-to-day work.

Daily meetings

Our daily catch-ups give us a chance to see some friendly, familiar faces, talk about what we’re doing inside and outside of work, gripe about some things, gloat about others. It’s also crucial for making sure everyone is on the same page with their tasks.

Which is useful because one of the of the downsides of working remote is that it’s hard to just turn to someone and ask a question. It’s just that much harder to do that at home.

Having a time every day where you can ask some stupid questions to make sure everything is going in the right direction gives you a bit of psychological runway. That runway pushes back doubt and uncertainty, letting staff get through their work with confidence and satisfaction about their efforts.

Don’t let grumbling put you off

You might be thinking “everyone hates meetings though”. Which might be a fair point, but in our experience everyone’s still on time for them, which wasn’t always the case when they were face to face. And they still contribute.

We’d happily err on the side of having one meeting too many, one podcast too many, one email too many, than risk staff feeling like they’re twisting in the wind or not valued.

And ultimately, that’s what why communication and inclusion produces motivation and engagement. We’re putting every day, every task, every role into a wider context. Showing that other colleagues appreciate and depend on their work, and demonstrating that what they’re doing has value.

Cash-value rewards, recognition software, and incentive systems do work, but only prosper long-term when employees are motivated by more than a transaction. That’s why you need to embrace communication to keep engagement and motivation in good supply in the home office.

It’s not always fancy, but it is effective

The importance of talking and communicating with your staff can’t be understated. These are simple tactics, but sticking with them is how you’ll be able to communicate culture, talk about your values and make sure everyone feels connected.

Like we said in another blog recently, you can’t put this genie back in its bottle. We all know now that we could have done this before. It just won’t be possible to tell a workforce in the future that home working isn’t realistic. At least not with a straight face.

Baking these habits into your company now is how you’re going to keep, and strengthen, company culture and staff morale as you navigate the world during, and after, COVID-19.

As always, if you want to talk about motivating and engaging your staff, get in touch. We’re always happy to chat.

Separate, but together – bringing teams together for the “new normal”

April 27, 2020/in Long blogs, Short blogs /by Love2shop

What the world is experiencing now is genuinely unprecedented. Never before have so many people worked in such a separated way, and this rapid change has thrown a raft of issues at businesses.

Whether it’s the tech issues from a suddenly-digital workforce, or the difficulty of creating and delivering digital products, companies around the UK are finding ways to answer new challenges.

But an equally important challenge is finding a way to keep morale, engagement, and a sense of community when everyone’s at home. That’s where employee recognition, including peer-to-peer recognition, shines.

Not just for the crisis either. As we’ll discuss below, there won’t be a return to the “normal” we knew it before this pandemic. A different mentality will be coming back to the workplace, and strong employee recognition is part of building for that future.

Get it right today, for a very different tomorrow

The changes we’re all seeing now are guaranteed to have permanent effects. There are so many rules and rituals from the world of work that we’ve pared away in isolation, it will be impossible to go back like it was before.

That might be your strict office dress code, believing staff can’t work from home, or that families are incompatible with work. Without them, we can see now that these rituals were exactly that – just gestures of mutual comfort. Group therapy.

What holds companies together is the work of employees, the quality of their collaboration, and the relationships between those employees. That’s what’s holding us together right now – good people, good work, and good ideas. And that’s why this time is so vital to every business.

When the physical offices do start to re-open, we can’t put this genie back in the bottle. You can’t un-see a CEO, or department head, delivering his monthly update with his toddler on his lap. We can’t un-learn that we’re all capable of working at home. We can’t believe that a tie makes anyone better at their job.

Embracing recognition, and making it a fundamental part of how your business interacts, has always been a vital building block in employee engagement. Right now, it’s also an important part of forming a foundation that your company can build on for later. A central, accessible recognition platform makes that task much easier.

With that in mind, we’ll outline how your company will benefit from recognition during the lockdown, and in the future.

Building vital connections in difficult times

The fundamental core of recognition, particularly social recognition, is connection and communication. The very things that we’re all struggling with right now, if we’re honest. Recognition affects the quality of the connection between colleagues, their work, and their company.

Connection to colleagues

With office workers flying solo, it’s important to make sure everyone still knows their work is important and treasured. Sat in the home office, filing your work digitally, it’s easy to feel a bit disconnected. It’s also easy to feel like no one’s noticing your best efforts.

As we’re always so eager to point out, nothing makes someone feel valuable quite like gratitude. Putting that gratitude in a public forum gives it more weight – not only is their work prized by their colleagues, those colleagues feel it merits wider recognition. While we’re apart, physically, this is exactly the kind of positive communication that keeps us feeling together.

Even your furloughed employees can benefit from recognition. By making them a part of your recognition programme, it’s clear they’re not in the cold right now.

For some people, the idea of furlough might sound like a luxury, but for many employees it’s immensely stressful to feel like they’re not contributing. Recognition and inclusion now will be a game-changer in their mentality when they come back in to work.

Connection to the organisation

While our platform puts the focus on recognition between employees, managers have a vital role to play in recognition as well.

During this time, they’re the key link between an employee and their business. An avatar of your company itself. This gives them a unique responsibility. Not only are they now a vital link between staff and their company, but they’re also a vital link between staff and their work.

Recognition contextualises efforts, making it clear that work is important to wider departmental and company-wide efforts. Making sure good work is recognised, and contextualised, helps keep employees from developing tunnel vision about their work, seeing it box-ticking and task-completion.

A great deal of the satisfaction of good work is its contribution to an achievement bigger than ourselves. Managers recognising the work of their team is an opportunity to bring that to life. In turn, staff maintain a sense of connection to the importance of their contributions, and their place in the business.

Connection to values

Talking to our clients and peers in other businesses, one of the most common things we hear is the absolute, imperative need to just get work done. Vital, business-securing work. Under that kind of strain and pressure, it’s easy to justify thinking that the ends justify the means.

In that kind of environment, and without the feeling of supervision staff get from a physical office, values might be put aside. They might feel like distant concepts for a different situation. We both know, that’s not true. The crux of what we’re saying here is that they matter as much as ever.

If staff see, and learn, that enough pressure is a justifiable reason to set your values aside, they won’t be so hesitant to do it again. Recognition, however, keeps a connection to those values alive by linking them to employees’ positive efforts.

Platforms like Shout channel expressions of recognition through company values, making both elements public. This makes sure all those achievements, all the examples of collaboration, have a clear connection back to your business’ values. This keeps the values alive in the minds of your staff.

It’s not just about projecting ideas on to staff, though; workplace communication has to be a two-way street. And public recognition is your chance to listen.

Social recognition is also a chance to listen

An active peer-to-peer recognition platform makes an excellent listening tool, on top of its value in communication to staff. As employees document the achievements of their colleagues, they document what’s important to them.

Logging into the Appreciate Group recognition platform now, it’s clear what matters to our staff. Some are thanking their colleagues for keeping the lines of communication open. Some are grateful for a fast-fix to a bug on the Love2shop app. Others are just grateful that IT is providing their VPN connection. It’s a simple temperature-check for what’s going on with our peers.

Collectively, these are evidence of the kind of challenges our colleagues are dealing with, what’s most pressing to them, and what they’re most energised about fixing. You can be empathetic to what’s happening and what’s on the minds of your staff without having to continually quiz them.

And right now, what could be more valuable to your employees than a bit of empathy?

The best time to plant a tree….

As we’ve been keen to stress, right now is a crucial time to act. The workforce that walks back into the office in three, six, or nine months’ time isn’t going to be same people that went home with their laptops in March.

The strength of how they return will depend on the foundations that every business lays now, including how you embrace recognition as a core component of employee communication and collaboration. Recognition alone isn’t the answer. But it’s a vital part of a wider engagement and communication strategy that will make your company stronger when we all come back to work down the line.

As ever, if you want to talk about it, we’re here for you. Use the contact details on this page, or shoot us a question in the live chat, and we’d be happy to talk.

Why some recognition schemes just don’t work – are you guilty of these 3 little mistakes?

February 7, 2020/in Short blogs /by Love2shop

We all want a successful recognition programme in place. After all, the aims of any reward and recognition programme are all about benefits. Benefits to employees, your business, even employee acquisition and retention.

However, the sad fact is that some recognition programmes just don’t work. The results you’re looking for don’t come. If you’ve launched an employee recognition scheme without success, don’t lose heart – just change your tactics.

Recognition schemes tend to perpetuate a number of common mistakes. See if you can spot yourself on this list.

You don’t consult employees

Employees are at the heart of your business, so it makes sense that when you recognise them, you are giving them what they actually want as opposed to what you think they need. It isn’t just about the recognition on offer, but also about how you reward.

If your current plans include a big song and dance and company presentation, you may have your introverts hiding under the table to avoid something that makes them squirm.

If you decide to reward top performers with an annual exotic break, single parents and carers are probably sighing in exasperation.

Consulting employees with a survey, or getting to grips with what gets them going face-to-face, is the only way to get a real understanding of what your employees want. You might even be surprised that it’s predominantly verbal recognition and respect that resonates most with your teams.

Then, when you’re putting your recognition plans together, make sure you carefully consider what your employees have told you and plan accordingly.

Your communication is too sparse

We know that communicating recognition often feels low priority, but every business gets busy. If you have a recognition and reward programme in place, there can never be too much communication around it.

Tell your new employees. Remind your current employees. Shout about the winners and highly commended team members in your newsletters, meetings and noticeboards, even on social media.

A recognition programme ceases to be relevant when it’s not top of mind. Keep it fresh and breathe life into it – harness your marketing team to get it alive and kicking once again. Making it a priority is essential for your managers as well and now is the time to reiterate why recognition is so vital to your business.

You rely on manual intervention

We mentioned that your business is busy, but if you rely on manual work to keep your recognition programme going, it’s always going to fail in some way unless you are hyper-vigilant. Technology is the answer.

Recognition platforms are available to help you reward and recognise employees and improve the morale in your company.

Technology allows you to take a step back and introduce employee-led elements into the programme, whether that’s a peer-to-peer mechanic, leader boards, real-time engagement or the ability to self-select rewards. Technology can simplify employee recognition and make it more effective.

Remember that when it comes to recognising employees, the whole point is to ensure that employees are in the spotlight for the work that they do. Make sure that they receive valuable recognition and rewards in a way that works for them, and you’ll find your employees are more productive, happier and even healthier, resulting in sustained business success.

About the author:

Elaine Keep is the owner and director of Incentive & Motivation, among the longest standing titles in the employee and customer reward space catering to HR pros. Elaine is also the founder of Your Marketing Managed, offering marketing management, content production and copy writing services.

The 15 most popular Love2shop blogs of 2019

November 28, 2019/in Short blogs /by Love2shop

Through 2019 we’ve published plenty of blogs. News, opinions, guides, resources and more. We’ve put together the most popular blogs from 2019, all in one place in case you missed anything during the year.

Read the full blog

Fourteen effective ways to improve staff retention and slash your recruitment budget

Read time: 10 minutes

“The stats show that employee turnover is a giant financial burden to the nation’s employers. In 2016 alone, one in seven UK employees resigned from a position. The good news is many problems that cause high turnover are avoidable. Start with the idea we lay out here.”

Read the full blog

You’re killing staff morale without even realising it, and we can explain how

Read time: 5 minutes

Read the full blog

You could have had your say, too

Your writing could be on this list, if you’d have submitted a piece. The Love2shop blog is open to submissions from guests. Read more about what we’re looking for, and how you can help us out, here.

8 reasons you can’t afford to ignore recognition

November 5, 2019/in Short blogs /by Love2shop

If there’s one place to start to improve your company culture, it’s staff recognition. And the stats prove it.

We have eight key staff recognition stats in this blog that show how much you stand to gain from embracing recognition.

Recognition affects key areas in your business like:

Employee retention

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Productivity

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Customer service

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Employee happiness

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Employee engagement

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^{*SHRM 2012 survey}

As the stats show, every company needs to be thinking about employee recognition. There are clear arguments for the benefits of embracing recognition, so why not put these to your senior leadership team?

4 frightening outcomes of a recognition-deficient culture

October 28, 2019/in Short blogs /by Love2shop

As Halloween approaches, many companies will be planning some spooky fun. From dressing up to creepy cupcakes, being creative and celebrating together boosts morale.

Scheduled events like this are a great way to build a fun ‘together’ culture. Something which organisations across the world are spending more time and energy into developing.

Creating an environment where employees can thrive, be happy and produce their best work is a holy grail for people leaders. And it’s a key factor in commercial success.

A number of factors help curate those positive cultures. And one area that increasingly gets recongised for its positive impact is recognition itself.

Numerous studies have highlighted the amazing benefits that recognition-rich cultures have on workforces. It’s a primary driver of long-term employee engagement.

Of course, recognition might not directly influence all measures of engagement or working culture. But a lack of recognition can lead to a chain of negative emotions and behaviours. For example, feeling underappreciated can lead to demotivation, which can impact everything from mood to diet.

With that in mind, here’s a look at four scary outcomes for workplace cultures that fail to adequately recognise employee contributions.

1. Low employee engagement

Let’s start with the big one. Employee engagement describes the extent to which employees feel truly passionate about their jobs, their commitment to creating great outcomes and how much effort they’re likely to put in on a day-to-day basis.

Organisations with highly engaged workforces have been shown to be more profitable. As a result, companies struggling to engage staff can expect negative outcomes. From high voluntary turnover to low productivity and reduced customer satisfaction.

The importance of the role recognition plays in driving engagement was highlighted in Aon’s 2018 Trends in Global Employee Engagement report. The report noted rewards and recognition as “the strongest driver of engagement”.

Gallup estimates that around 16% of the workforce is actively disengaged with over half just ‘turning up’. While factors such as poor leadership and development opportunities are also key, recognition has a pivotal role to play in turning ‘working for a pay cheque’ into ‘loving my job’.

2. A lack of trust

One survey from Tolero confirmed this. 45% of employees they asked said that a lack of trust in leadership was the biggest issue impacting their work performance.

Employee recognition has a big role to play here as it builds that trust between employees and management. Leaders with a knack for showing appreciation for effort and achievement will find their teams performing higher. And find them more willing to overcome hurdles – even during challenging periods.

And the direct act of recognition is the only element that builds trust. The feel-good vibes and positivity that flow in appreciative cultures increase trust between colleagues and management.

3. Low motivation and productivity

Motivation links intrinsically to productivity, and motivation inspires employees to meet deadlines and deliver results.

Organisations where staff members, whole teams or even an entire workforce lacks motivation are going to massively struggle to meet any of their corporate aims.

This ‘demotivation’ causes a deep lack of interest in and enthusiasm for work. It stunts individual productivity and affects business results. It’s one of the biggest causes for a bad atmosphere in the workplace.

And research shows not celebrating work outcomes and behaviour makes low motivation more likely.

4. Forgotten values and purpose

A culture that doesn’t appreciate or celebrate behaviours makes it difficult to embed company values.

On a basic level, employees need to understand how their actions and attitude at work are driving your company to a single aim. And understand how that behaviour fits into your company values.

Values-based recognition, where recognition links back to a company value, reinforces those values. This approach then makes it more likely and enables employees to continue to promote that value.

Will engagement give you a scare soon?

How active is your organisation when it comes to promoting recognition as a core fundamental of your working culture?

Do you have the tools in place to enable managers and empower colleagues to make showing appreciation for one another part of their daily routine? Find out more about how social recognition software can deliver for your business.

About Workstars

Workstars is the first global social recognition platform. Putting employee engagement and positive workplace culture to the heart of every HR strategy. Their market-leading technology is the heartbeat of our own social recognition platform, Shout!.

find out if you can use Love2shop vouchers online

Can you use Love2shop Vouchers online?

September 23, 2019/in Short blogs /by Love2shop

The short answer is no, there’s no way to use Love2shop vouchers online.

That’s not the end of the story though. For anyone in need of an online reward, our catalogue has you well and truly covered.

Love2shop Gift cards can be spent at selected online retailers

The Love2shop Gift Card is one of the most popular rewards in the UK right now. It’s a powerful mutli-retailer reward option.

On top of to the 95+ in-store places to spend our gift cards, you can spend them on the websites of selected retailers. We partner with a select group of online stores, who take our card direct on their websites. That includes popular brands like Argos and MasterChef.

See the full list of retailers and online spend available on our gift card here.

E-gift cards come with online retailers

Love2shop Gift Cards also give recipients access to our e-gift cards. E-gift cards are digitally-delivered gift cards than can be spent online and in-store.

Using our mobile app or Love2shop.co.uk, card holders swap the value of the funds on their Love2shop Gift Card for an e-gift card of equivalent value.

The e-gift card arrives over email, along with easy three-step instructions on how to redeem it online or in person.

The Love2shop E-gift Card range is a thrilling blend of high street brands, online shopping, exclusive experiences, dining out and more.

Combined with our direct online spend options, there’s plenty of online rewards available through the Love2shop Gift Card. All while keeping an in-store spend option.

Read more about the Love2shop Gift Card and its online features here.

Fully digital rewards with Evolve

If online is your destination, why not start there?

Our digital rewards platform, Evolve, is based around digital reward codes. Distributed instantly through SMS or email, the codes unlock a giant catalogue of rewards.

Once in the catalogue, your recipient just picks the reward at the value they want. We handle everything else.

Our codes are lightning fast, and incredibly simple. They’re a great option for a business that needs to send rewards fast to just about anyone, anywhere.

Going fully digital also doesn’t cost the end user anything, in cost or choice. A huge reward catalogue is available to anyone with a Love2shop Reward Code.

They can keep the whole reward redemption online, or order their own vouchers or gift card from the catalogue. And as we said above, we handle all the delivery for you.

Read more about the Evolve platform here.

Going online with Love2shop

While you can’t use a Love2shop voucher online, Love2shop’s selection of rewards very much has a home in the digital world.

Whether you need the tactile pleasure of delivering a gift card that accesses digital rewards, or you want to sit fully in the digital world, we have something for your audience.

We hope you enjoyed the summer, because it’s time to think about Christmas

September 16, 2019/in Short blogs /by Love2shop

There’s officially less than 100 days to go until Christmas. And even less than that before our last order on Christmas rewards.

That might seem like a long time. But between then and now, lots of companies are in a mad sprint to wrap up outstanding projects.

We know we like to come into the year with a fresh start, nothing left undone before a winter break.

So we understand when rewards aren’t always the first thing on people’s minds at this time of year.

But our customers do have a habit of leaving things til the last minute. We’ve got the phone bills to prove it.

We don’t mind that, obviously, and we’re here for you right up until the week before Christmas. But a lot of you could save yourselves some stress by putting your orders in early.

Love2shop has Christmas covered

We’re among the UK’s most trusted and most popular Christmas reward suppliers.

More than 30,000 businesses turn to Love2shop every year for their end-of-year rewards.

They come back for our fun rewards, quick delivery and a team of account handlers that can’t go far enough for our clients.

Whatever your staff or customers need, we have you well covered.

Gift cards

The Love2shop Gift Card is one of the most popular rewards in the UK.

It comes with 95+ in-store retailers, a selection of online retailers, and an e-gift card exchange on Love2shop.co.uk.

Our e-gift card exchange lets a gift card holder trade the value of their card for a reward from a special online catalogue.

This opens up an extra selection of in-store retailers, online shops, experiences, restaurants and more.

We also offer a special selection of custom Christmas designs, pictured above, for extra festive flavour.

Having so much to choose from is what makes our gift card Love2shop’s flagship reward product.

Reward codes

Our reward codes are super fast, super flexible rewards.

They’re delivered through SMS or email, and redeemed online. The codes open up a huge catalogue of gifts.

Code recipients pick from high street brands, online shops, meals, exclusive experiences and more. Whatever you need, we handle all the delivery and fulfillment.

Because they’re mobile and digital, they’re prefect for employees working remote. You can send codes direct to users, or include them in a personalised Christmas message.

Gift vouchers

The Love2shop Gift Voucher is (still) the most popular multi-retailer voucher in the UK.

And with good reason. Our vouchers are accepted in more 150 stores across more than 20,000 locations in the UK. That includes beloved brands like Argos, HMV, New Look, River Island, Waterstones and Schuh.

They’re immediate, tactile, and easy to include with Christmas cards or recognition letters.

Hampers

Hampers are ideal when you really want to make a fuss.

We have a range of hamper options that are guaranteed to delight your staff. They’re overflowing with indulgences like chocolates, wine, gin and more.

Talk to us

Whichever rewards you think work best for your business, get in touch with the team. They’re always happy to chat. But for your own sake, we recommend you get your orders in early. Once it’s out of the way, you can tick it off the list and rest easy.

We call last orders for Christmas orders at 15:00 on December the 20th, so feel free to get in touch any time before then and we’ll be here to help.

9 corporate perks top talent can’t ignore

September 4, 2019/in Short blogs /by Love2shop

Corporate perks are one of the big ways companies are fighting the war for talent. A war that, according to the ONS, is intensifying.

It’s ever-more important for your business to find creative ways to attract and keep quality staff.

But corporate perks aren’t just about blinding staff with cheap, glitzy gifts. Quality employees are more clever than that.

These perks need to be an extension of how you see employees, and the kind of workplace culture you want to enjoy.

Don’t just think about what’s going to make you look funky and different when job-seekers are scrolling through CV warehouses’ open roles.

Think about how your perks reflect your attitude towards staff and your business.

1. Travel

Travelling is enriching, energising and broadens the mind. It’s also one of the most common ambitions your employees are likely to have.

Offering time and resources to see the world will enrich the minds of your staff. And your employees will see that you value them not just as professionals, but individuals.

2. Employee rewards

Make sure staff efforts don’t go without reward and recognition. Rewards become long-lasting trophies and positive memories for staff.

Jump over here if you want the full run-down on everything need to know before offering employee rewards.

3. Flexible hours

Modern life has a funny way of refusing to fit comfortably in the time outside 9am and 5pm.

Showing a bit of trust and letting staff be flexible with hours makes it much more comfortable to balance work and life. Remote working access would also be a huge game-changer for a lot of staff.

4. Time to volunteer

If you care about something, and it’s part of your company’s values, give your staff a stake in it.

Let them put some time aside every year to volunteer for a good cause that reflects what your company’s about.

As a corporate perk, it’s more than a feel-good exercise. Your staff get invested in the same things your company cares about, improving employee engagement. And boosting internal sentiment about your company.

5. Holiday trading

If you’re not already familiar, holiday trading is a form of salary sacrifice. Employees give up a slice of their annual pay for an equivalent number of days off. Or selling their extra holiday back.

As we pointed out in the flexible working section, everyone’s life is a bit different. And what’s important to everyone is different.

Some employees would relish the chance for an extra week with their family. Other work-obsessives might bristle when asked to take their days out of the office.

The most important thing is that the choice is there.

6. Training and development

The ugly stereotype that millennial staff are fickle job-hoppers does start with a sliver of the truth. Millennial staff are keen to learn, and they’re keen to take opportunities to grow.

Offering opportunities for staff to grow has two major effects. Talented people will seize the opportunity to develop their skills, and they’ll be inclined to stay with the companies that invest in them.

7. Staff discounts

Make the everyday a little bit easier, every day. Offer your employees a way to ease the daily burden of the things they can’t avoid making part of their routine spending.

Even discounts that seem small add up quickly when you use them over the course of a year.

Alternatively, you could arrange discounts on services like laundry, gym membership or cafes by dealing in bulk with local suppliers.

Staff will appreciate a corporate perk that does something positive for them every day.

9. Profit-sharing

Sometimes an employee can feel a bit divorced from the impact of their work. The difference between the company having a good year and a brilliant year might not get them fired up.

If it’s right for your company culture, profit-sharing would build more investment between employees and the success of the company.

They’d have more emotional connection to the effects of their work, and a sense of connection with the business.

Empathy first

The common thread through these corporate perks is having a bit of empathy. Acknowledging staff are human beings, not just cogs in a machine. People with needs, ideas, and wants.

That’s the foundation of any attempt to deploy some difference-making perks to attract and keep top staff. Get the emotional core right before fretting about which perk is right for your business.