A key part of rewarding the loyalty and efforts of your employees is by paying them a good salary and hopefully bonuses. But what if you are not in a position to do that? Maybe you can’t even give them equity. Yet being able to reward the effort and loyalty of your employees is sometimes a vital factor in keeping your company going even when things aren’t going so well. And learning how to do this is an important part of your own management skill and your own personal development as a manager.

So in this article I am going to set out some of the ways you can reward your employees without using money or monetary gifts, at least by not having to give more money to the employee.
Maybe you will never need to do this. Then again, maybe you will. You never know.

Just about every employee, no matter what their level, is looking for two things:
•	A sense of mission
•	A purpose in life

There has been a lot of research which shows that most employees are not just looking for more money from their job. Other things are often more important to them than making more money in life. This includes things like personal relationships and family and helping others. So we need to think about these motivations when we think about motivating and rewarding our
employees.

You can support your employees to reach these goals without paying them more salary or bonuses. In fact, if you do that without attending to their basic motivations, you might lose their respect, even if they are grateful to you in the short-term for giving them more money. But your job is to also help them in the longer-term and to help them have a happier and more productive life. You can do that in part by supporting them in the following areas:

1.	Career assistance
2.	Enhancing their learning
3.	Addressing their personal needs and problems
4.	Helping them with their family
5.	Helping them with their retirement
 
6.	Helping them get recognized for their achievements
7.	Helping them to help others


1.	Career Assistance

Most people want help in improving their career prospects. Especially for younger people, they often won’t know what are good or bad choices for them, and what is the best way they can go. You can help them in the following ways:

•	Giving them career assistance and advice: what is the best career path for them, and how should they be doing now to get there?
•	If they are not in the best position to maximize their career performance, helping them recognize that and working with them to show them better career paths, and even helping them to find a new career path in another company that will be better for them
•	Helping them apply for other more appropriate jobs and roles, either in their current company, or in another company
•	Coaching them generally in personal and professional skills that will help them get onto the best path for them individually.


2.	Enhancing their Learning

Learning is often a huge incentive and opportunity for many employees. It enhances their long- term value both as an employee and in other ways –e.g. by making them more attractive as a marriage partner. There are many things you can do which offer these employees a huge amount of value and reward. These include:

•	Helping them get a part-time degree: giving them time off for study; giving them a job role that is related to their study; helping them with a book allowance; contacting their school and professors to offer the company’s support to the school e.g. by offering internships to the school.
•	Sabbaticals: offering long-time employees the opportunity to take time off from a few weeks to a few months to study something related to their career which will help both then and their company by adding new skills that aren’t possible to get in a normal working environment.
•	Travel scholarship: scholarships to travel to see new technologies, new product sin new countries and situations.
•	Conferences: provide the opportunity to go to conferences that are different to the ones they would normally attend at your company (if they attend them at all)
•	Overseas travel; to see governments, policies, companies, products and services that they wouldn’t see at home.
•	Short courses: course of a short duration say from 1-4 weeks to learn new skills or approaches.
•	Help with publications: You will have some employees who have special knowledge that they want to publish, or who would like to begin writing and publishing, either fiction or
 
nonfiction. For these people, help, advice and support to them to help them get published will be an enormously valuable asset to them.

3.	Personal and Mental Improvement

Many of your employees are looking for direction and support in their personal lives. Maybe they have problems at home or with a partner. Help and support might be much more valuable to them than just money. So here are several ideas on which you can support them in this area of their lives:

•	Marital and relationship counseling; how about having a marital or relationship therapist on retainer for the use of your employees?
•	Mental and emotional health: There are several possibilities here. How about arranging classes for your employees in serval fields related to emotional health such as meditation and yoga and mindfulness?
•	Personal and life skills: Some of your employees, especially those who are very shy, introverted or who lack confidence will value help to learn how to address these issues so that they can face life in a more confident way that will help them both socially, professionally as well as personally. How about sending them to classes on presentation and speaking skills such as Toastmasters (in the US)? Or classes on acting and self- presentation?
•	Exercise: It’s well-known that exercise is a powerful way of addressing many mental health issues such as depression. In addition exercise improves a person’s health and happiness. So why not provide gym memberships to your staff or to particular staff? Or maybe have the company sponsor classes in marital arts and dance?

4.	Family

All of your employees have a family. It doesn’t matter whether their family is young or old, they will almost all have particular needs and issues that arise with their family which your company can provide support for in immensely valuable ways. These include:

•	Family and emergency leave: All families occasionally have an emergency either children, older parents or relatives. One of the best ways to give your employees support is to be generous with leave for these unexpected events.
•	Child care; particularly for women, child care is hugely important. A company can sponsor its own child care facilities or support external facilities that their employees can use.
•	Hosting a lunch or dinner with an employee and his/her partner? Sometimes the mental health and happiness of an employee’s partner is just as important as that of the employee him or herself. So you try to meet with them occasionally, one-on-one, not just as part of a large party. In that way you can get to know them better and understand the needs of the family as well as the employee.
•	Help with personal problems such as alcohol and drugs: It’s not just in countries such as the US that family members might have a problem of substance abuse such as with drugs or alcohol. Your company can help by being sympathetic to employees who have
 
family members with such problems providing access to specialized counseling, care and facilities where assistance can be obtained to help address these problems.
•	Grief counseling: At some time many of your employees will have family members die or suffer from other traumatic problems. As families break down and become physically distant from each other, the lack of family support becomes more of a problem. This is particularly the case when a close person dies. Having grief counsellors available for them to talk to can be a huge blessing.
•	Care for aged relatives: Increasingly employees have aged parents and relatives who have both health problems and problems in their daily life just doing their normal activities. Often these relatives are not even in the same city. Your company can help by having a sympathetic attitude to employees who face these issues, by providing some leave for being with aged relatives and parents, and by providing access to specialized support for health issues such as Alzheimer’s, which will be a problem increasingly faced by many of the aged parents and relatives of your employees.
•	Flexible working arrangements: So that employees can be available to help their children, aged relatives and family members with other problems (e.g. taking care of family members who are physically or mentally disabled), you can offer flexible working arrangements. This includes working from home, part-time work, and flexible hours. These can be very effective ways to help your employees with services that are much more valuable than just receiving a higher salary or bonus.
•	Internships for children; a very effective way of providing something of great value to your employees is unpaid internships for their children. This provides them with work experience, career assistance and support, and a way of looking at job options and career directions. This will be highly valued by your employees.

5.	Preparation for Retirement

Some of your employees will be approaching retirement. That doesn’t just mean employees who are near to retirement. Some of your employees might be 10-15 years away but are still worried it about it, how they will pay for it and what they will do when they are retired and don’t have a job anymore. Here are some ways you can help them.

•	Retirement coaching: having ca coach working with them to identify special skills and hobbies they have that they can develop and conduct once they are retired.
•	Setting up a retirement skills bank: Some of your employees who have retired or who are about to retire have skills that can be useful to the company sometimes, Have someone develop catalog of the skills possessed by your employees and set up a matching activity so these can be used within the company, either for no pay or minimum pay.
•	Preparation for retirement: Why not sponsor sessions for employees who are near to retirement that shows them some of the support resources they can use and to help them adjust to retirement themselves?


6.	Recognition
 
Just giving an employee special recognition for their achievements can be a powerful way of getting their loyalty independent of money. Some of the ones below are the more obvious ones that many companies use but it’s possible to forget them so we will include them here just to make this a complete article:

•	Visits with individual employees:
o	Have the CEO or a senior group just visits the employee at his or her desk just to thank them, publicly, for their contribution. You don’t need to give a gift, or just a very small one for this to be effective.
o	How about making sure that the receptionists greet special employees in a special way when they get to the company entrance?
o	Why not have the CEO or a senior executive bring the employee a cup of tea or coffee for morning tea break?
•	Company ambassadors: Award a special title to some of your more junior employees calling them something like “Company Ambassador”, giving them a special badge to wear, and inviting them to some of the meetings with your partners? Company ambassadors can have special privileges such as
o	Children invited for internships
o	Go to special training courses
o	Accelerated promotion
o	Acknowledging the work of company ambassadors publicly when senior executives make speeches to employees

7.	Helping Them to help Others

Many people, including many of your employees are not so concerned about just helping themselves. They also want to help others. Often they will respect a company more if they see their company also wanting to help others, or to help them help others. So there are a number of things a company can do in this area to support the efforts of their employees to help others:

•	Preferred charities: Build a list of preferred charities suggested by employees and contribute to them
•	Time off: Give time off to employees for nonprofit or charitable activities; this can be either on a regular basis (say 4 hours a week) or more time occasionally (say one month a year)
•	Profits: Many US companies give a fixed proportion of their profits to charities; if your company does this you can divide the amount you give to charity by the number of employees so that you can tell the employees how much money they individually gave to the charity; if you like this as a virtual bonus, that is, a bonus for the employee which is given to a charity.

There’s more to life than money. By adopting some of the above approaches you can gain the respect of your employees in a way that wouldn’t otherwise occur.

And guess what? You can do some of the above and give them extra salary and bonuses too!

Dr. E. Ted Prince, the Founder and CEO of the Perth Leadership Institute, located in Florida in the US has also been CEO of several other companies, both public and private. He is the author
 
of two books: “The Three Financial Styles of Very Successful Leaders” (McGraw-Hill, 2005) and “Business Personality and Leadership Success”, Amazon Kindle 2011 as well as numerous other publications in this area. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. He works with large corporations globally on leadership development programs and coaches senior executives and teams in the area of financial leadership. He has held the position of Visiting Professor at the University of Florida in the US in its Graduate Business School and also at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in China.