Why bulk reward goes wrong at Christmas and how to avoid the problems

Overcome familiar headaches with earlier planning and digital delivery

Christmas reward should be a simple thank you for a year of hard work and not much work for you. If you have managed a bulk Christmas reward campaign before, however, you may remember the task differently. Perhaps rewards arrived late, employee details were wrong or unused vouchers were still sitting in a drawer in January. Maybe you spent weeks answering questions about missing rewards without being able to see what employees had received or claimed.

These problems usually come down to a mix of timing and tools, such as leaving things too late, or not having a system built to handle both delivery and what happens next. Here are the key reasons why things go wrong and how digital reward delivery for Christmas can help you solve your problems.

You leave too little time

Christmas reward planning has a habit of slipping down the priority list until it's suddenly urgent. Two things account for most of that lost time, and neither is the send itself. Getting the budget approved means chasing a stakeholder or two, and building an accurate recipient list means pulling data together and checking it properly. Both depend on other people, which is why they take longer than you'd expect. Starting earlier from September onwards removes that pressure and gives you enough time to get the budget approved and the list right.

The send is the easier part as long as you are using a digital reward delivery service that is built for the purpose. Once you've signed off the budget and the list is ready, you can manage issuance in a matter of minutes with just a few simple steps. Watch the video on our employee reward page to see how.

Reward ends up scattered across spreadsheets and vouchers

A lot of Christmas reward still runs on the same process it always has. A manager buys a stack of vouchers on a card, someone else tracks recipients on spreadsheets, and nobody holds one clear view. It's a familiar picture, and not just at small organisations.

This kind of ungoverned process gets messy very quickly, and it gets harder to manage the more employees you have.

A single, frictionless digital reward delivery system for Christmas replaces the spreadsheets and vouchers with one place to see everything.

You lose sight of what happens next

Once they have sent out a bulk reward, too many teams lose sight of what happens to it. Has everyone received their reward? How many have redeemed? Do people need a reminder?

Without real time reporting, you end up investigating individual queries and piecing things together from separate records, which makes it hard to show how the programme performed or improve it next year.

Choose digital reward for Christmas, however, and the live reporting in your reward delivery service will help you to get the visibility that you and your payroll team need to stay in control and get full value for your efforts.

Budget committed and never recovered

Employees don't always redeem their reward. Vouchers go unclaimed, value expires, and money meant for the team disappears with nothing to show for it. Poor visibility makes this worse, since nobody notices what's gone unclaimed until it's too late to act.

Look for a service where unspent value returns to your account automatically rather than expiring, so nothing committed to reward is ever truly lost.

The thank you feels like an afterthought

Even when reward arrives on time, it can still land poorly if it's a generic code with no message and no thought behind it.

But if you have the capability to build a personal message and a wide choice of retailers into every send, you will shift from Christmas rewards people redeem without a second thought into delivering reward that they value.

Our Christmas Employee Reward Hub shows you how to deliver that experience for even the largest of bulk sends, with digital distribution, personalisation and clear visibility throughout the process.