Online Extras

You can hold month-long contests where you assign points for positive behaviors. At the end of the month, you tally up the points and the winner gets an award.

The reward can be a special prize, cash, or even a non-cash award like a special parking place outside the store for a month, or even the most cushy and comfortable chair during meetings for a month. You can give the winner an extra day off. Or you can serve as the winner's "Slave For a Day".

Here are some behaviors — not including sales made — that you can reward with bonuses or prizes: Great customer service, phone calls made and letters written to customers, perfect attendance, product knowledge (demonstrated by performance on a product-knowledge quiz). You can even reward an employee for quitting smoking — something that's great for you, and even better for them. Most of these behaviors can also be tracked on a results board visible to everyone in the company, in order to stir competitive juices.

Reward staff for serving customers well. One store gives bonus points to any employee heard referring to a customer by their name. Bob Nelson, author of 1001 Ways To Reward Employees, suggests that any time a staff member gets a positive comment from a customer — mostly on customer comment cards — they get a $10 bonus.