Employee reward delivery is what happens between deciding to reward your people and that reward actually landing with them. It sounds simple, and it can be. Yet we’ve seen how a reward process can grow into a collection of spreadsheets, retailer codes and gift cards stored in a secure drawer that only one person knows how to find.
A clear employee reward delivery process gives you a better route from good intention to reward received. It lets employees enjoy the moment while HR, finance and payroll get the information and reporting they need. In this guide, we share what we’ve learned about making that process work, from a single award to bulk employee reward for thousands of people.
What employee reward delivery actually means
Your reward programme and why you’re running it isn’t something we need to get into here. You already know who should receive a reward, why they’re receiving it and how much it should be worth.
Employee reward delivery is the bit that comes after that which should make the process easy for you and super-easy for your employees. Hitting at the right time, with right the message, with rewards that are meaningful, useful and with a simple way for you to issue and track the reward.
If you want more on why reward matters in the first place, our Employee Reward page covers that ground properly. This guide’s about what happens once you’ve already decided to reward someone.
The operational challenges of delivering reward at scale
Although it can be simple, in our experience many reward and benefits managers experience four key challenges with delivering employee reward, especially at scale.
The first is when you spot that reward spend has become a free for all. A spreadsheet and a few gift cards work fine when it’s just you running things. Add a second manager, a new site and a finance team asking for one clear number, and before long everyone’s keeping their own version of the truth and none of them quite match.
The second is a specific moment that forces the issue, such as a PAYE Settlement Agreement (PSA) review, a finance query nobody can answer easily, a compliance flag, or vouchers that goes missing or are delivered to the wrong people.
The third is Christmas, or any big seasonal moment, where a manual process that just about holds together all year has to cope with thousands of people on the same day. This is where the cracks in a spreadsheet-and-gift-card approach can make December more stressful than it needs to be.
The fourth is a new reward idea landing on your desk. Examples might include a service award scheme, incentives for training or survey completion or a spot reward someone in the business wants to launch quickly. Trying to build each of these from scratch, on top of everything else, is usually what finally tips things from manageable into overwhelming.
Other issues occur with getting recipient data right, which is particularly difficult if you don’t have all your recipients in one system.
Personalisation adds to the workload too. A milestone or service award should read like it was actually written for that person. That’s easy enough for ten people manually, but more difficult at scale if you don’t have a simple process that can handle it.
What good reward delivery looks like at any scale
Good reward delivery shouldn’t feel like a big process for you or your employees. Say you want to reward an individual or a team for a piece of work. If you choose a dedicated reward delivery service like Select, all your potential recipients are in one place. You can pick the person, set the value, add a personalised message from the awarding manager and send the reward there and then.
You can do the same for thousands of employees in the same number of steps. Set values for different employee groups, add relevant messages from a stored library and send.
The employees get the message and their reward in the form of an eGift card, instantly. They know exactly why it’s landed, and pick where to redeem from a catalogue of retailers and experiences they’ll actually use.
Providing this choice is important, because when you provide many options for redemption, at hundreds of retailers, it’s worth a lot more than a voucher that locks someone into one shop and doesn’t match what they actually want, whether that’s help with the cost of living, a day out, or ticking off the family Christmas list. No matter how many employees you have, there’s something for everybody.
Live reporting is a must-have too when you start operating at scale, so you can see how your scheme is performing, track redemption trends and see who was yet to redeem. When payroll and finance needs the detail, it’s already there for them, and your budget stays under control.
That’s really the whole test for your employee reward delivery. Simple enough that you don’t have to think twice. Useful enough that the employee wants to use it. Clear enough that you, payroll and finance never have to guess.
Getting set up quickly without disrupting what you already have
Setting up reward delivery doesn’t need to turn into a big project, and for most organisations it really shouldn’t.
A good standalone digital reward delivery service should sit alongside whatever HR, payroll and benefits software you already use, without needing an integration to go live or any IT involvement
Done properly, with the right provider, this can be a matter of a few days between your first conversation and your first send, not weeks.
When to use reward delivery and for which occasions
Your reward delivery needs to cover the full calendar of reward moments that you need to fulfil across the year and through the employee lifecycle.
Key moments may include milestone services reward or spot awards for great performance or contributions to the organisation. Effective delivery here will help ensure the reward lands within days of the moment it’s marking. The same applies to simple incentives like a coffee for survey completion or training sign off, where timeliness is key to encourage future repeat behaviour.
Reward delivery is also crucial for bulk employee rewards, most notably at Christmas or year end, when stress on your process is it its highest and you just need It to work.
Equally, having a good process in place will help you to respond to changing circumstances, such as when your organisation provides support for employees under cost of living pressure with a targeted supermarket food catalogue.
What matters most is that you have one reward fulfilment process flexible enough to cover all your needs and that provides a satisfying experience for recipients.
How to evaluate a reward delivery platform
Not every reward delivery platform is the same, so it’s worth figuring out where a provider sits before you get much further. Some, for example are bundled into a much bigger culture and communications system, where reward delivery is just one small feature among many. If you just want a simple way to deliver reward, your sweet spot is likely a service built specifically for the task.
Start your evaluation by watching the demos. Does the process look simple? Also ask the provider to walk you through the workflow, from issuing one award to handling your busiest seasonal send.
Here are all the key questions to ask of any provider or service you’re considering.
- How quickly can you get started, and what do you need ready first?
- Can your team run it day to day without pulling in IT?
- Does it handle one award and a bulk send to thousands without needing to be rebuilt?
- Is the choice of retailer wide enough that reward feels like a genuine choice?
- Can you see what’s been issued, redeemed and left outstanding, whenever you need to?
- Does it give you proper control over budget, so nothing gets spent without your say so?
- Who actually supports you and your employees if something goes wrong?
- What does it really cost once you add up setup, support and the reward itself?
It’s also worth asking to try it out as an employee would too. Open the message on your phone, follow the instructions and pick a retailer to see how it feels. Employees expect reward to feel as simple and immediate as the digital services they already use every day. That should be your standard.
Governance and compliance considerations
Governance sounds like a chore, but it doesn’t need to slow anything down. You will want visibility over values and recipient data, and finance will want something it can rely on without chasing you for it.
For every reward you should be able to easily answer a few simple questions, every time:
- Who authorised it
- Who received it
- What it was worth
- When it was issued
- Whether it’s been redeemed
Having those answers in one system, rather than scattered across spreadsheets and emails, turns reconciling spend by department from a monthly headache into a quick check. It’s worth keeping an eye on unspent reward too. Your employee reward delivery service should enable you to easily spot and recovered rewards that haven’t been redeemed so they can back into your budget.
Recipient data deserves care as well. Names, emails and sometimes addresses count as personal data, so it’s worth being clear on who can see it, how long you keep it, and how it’s handled if a third party is managing delivery on your behalf.
Tax is a separate conversation, and one worth having early rather than after you’ve already gone live. Employee reward can fall under HMRC’s trivial benefit exemption, currently up to £50 a gift, provided it isn’t cash, isn’t tied to performance, and isn’t contractual. Anything that doesn’t qualify may need to go through payroll, get reported on a P11D, or be covered by a PAYE Settlement Agreement instead, and whether an award is contractual or discretionary changes the picture too. It’s worth bringing payroll, finance and a qualified adviser into that conversation before you finalise anything new.
Making employee reward delivery work
None of this needs to be as complicated as it often ends up being. The right reward delivery platform brings everything together for you in one place, quick to set up, easy to run, with genuine choice for employees and a clear trail from issue to redemption for you. It shouldn’t feel like a project and more like something you barely think about once it’s up and running.
If you’re planning a seasonal send, our Christmas Employee Reward Hub has more on getting that right. And if you’d like to see how Reward Gateway Edenred approaches digital employee reward delivery for every moment, take a look at Select Employee Reward.
