ONLINE STORES

Work Designs offers customized online stores that make ordering easy for individual employees or members of your organization. You can select a preferred payment method, such as user points or credit card purchases. Store product availability is specific to your company, school, or organization and can also be tailored to user groups within your organization. For example, you can decide whether certain items are available only to managers or office workers or if they can be purchased by any user. Users can select from product options such as color, size, and imprint or logo preference. All stores include product images and descriptions, along with your company logo. Products can be browsed by category or through our product search feature.

What is a customized online store?

Your online store is a private website that is unique to your company and intended to be a place where you or your employees can easily order items from a catalog that you pre-select. We tend to think of two types of online stores: Company Stores and Incentives Stores (more on these below). While most stores tend to fall into one of these two categories, custom or hybrid approaches are certainly possible!

How would an online store benefit my company?

Online stores come in a lot of shapes and sizes and can be designed to fit many different needs, but broadly speaking, we find three main benefits to having an internal online store:

Brand Consistency

Online Stores help to ensure the integrity of your brand by giving you the chance to select and approve all items that your logo goes on well before they are ordered. When all of your branded items—from business cards to uniforms—are handled through a single online store, there is no more guess work or hunting for files. Work Designs already knows your company’s expectations and ordering an item only takes a few mouse clicks. If additional oversight is needed, an order approval process can also be implemented through your online store, giving management the power to quickly and easily review orders before they are placed.

Time & Cost Savings

Having an online store means fewer emails and phone calls for you and your employees when it comes to ordering company items. Personalized information, such as name embroidery or business card information, can be entered while shopping. The ordering process is streamlined, and fewer forwarded emails mean less confusion and less chance for error.

Since items are selected, designed, and pre-approved for ordering, it means less time spent reviewing proofs and revision emails on each and every item your company orders. It also means that the power to order items can be spread out to more employees, at your discretion, without having to worry about branding inconsistencies or a loss in quality. All of this, as well as the potential to save by combining shipping and purchasing in bulk, can translate to significant savings for your company.

By setting up an approval process or a points program, you can also control costs by monitoring and controlling spending. At your request, we can also run reports to give you an idea of how much has been spent on your store in a given time period, what items have been ordered, point balances, and more.

Morale & Employee Retention

Incentives Programs, as discussed below, are a great way to boost morale and encourage employees to meet company goals, such as safety or performance based goals. Incentives Programs have also been shown to increase company loyalty as well as boost productivity.

With more and more companies offering regular incentives programs, this also means that an incentives-based company store can make your company much more appealing to new talent, in turn making your company more competitive.

It is also important to note that studies suggest employees are more responsive to incentives programs when they have a voice in the rewards or when the rewards are designed with them in mind. An online store is an excellent way of giving your employees a choice in their incentive rewards and your Work Designs representative will be happy to work with you to find items that excite your employees.

Some of Our Online Store Features:

• Purchase options include credit card or a point-based system.
• You select point-to-dollar conversion.
• Points can be purchased and assigned to individual user accounts.
• We will help you to create a customized catalog and store.
• Product visibility can be limited by user groups.
• Stores can be made private, with password access.
• Users can sign up individually, or user accounts can be created by site admin.
• Users accounts are password protected.
• Users can set up account profiles and access order history.
• Product pages show images, descriptions, and include product options.

What types of online stores does Work Designs offer?

Company Stores

Your online Company Store is a place where you or your employees can view and order your company’s branded items. These would be items that your company orders regularly. Think about all of the items that your company logo goes on: apparel, business cards, signs, decals, envelopes, uniforms, PPE items, ink pens, and much more. A Company Store will help you and your employees to keep these items on hand by making the ordering process faster and easier. Company Stores also help you to maintain the integrity of your brand by ensuring that each of the items sold on your store is always produced consistently, to the specifications that you set out in the beginning.

Incentives Stores

An Incentives Store is a lot like a regular Company Store. While a hybrid store is certainly possible, Incentives Stores tend to be a little more focused on rewarding employees and increasing employee retention.

Incentives Stores usually reward employees for safety, long-term service, or other company goals. Employees that achieve these goals are awarded a set amount of points that he or she can spend on a catalog of items that you select.

Incentives Store catalogs can be set up in a number of different ways. Some offer a narrow list of branded items, while others give access to a wide array of unbranded items. It all depends on what you envision for your employees! As you can imagine, this can be a great way to give your employees a little extra bonus or motivation to achieve individual or group objectives.

Incentives Programs

What are some of the benefits of implementing an incentives program?

Attracting and Retaining Good Employees

Reward-based incentives programs are becoming an increasingly more common way for businesses to attract and retain employees. Hiring and training new employees is expensive and can be a drain on company resources as well as workplace morale. Incentives programs help to reduce employee turnover and make the company more attractive to new hires by not only offering added benefits, but also through establishing a company culture that prioritizes the recognition of good work and rewards loyalty and service to the company.

In addition to making a company more attractive to new hires, incentives programs help current employees to feel more valued by their employers, which in turn leads them to feel a greater sense of commitment to the company.

Many business owners with existing incentives programs see their programs as vital to attracting and keeping good employees, and they feel that they might otherwise lose these employees to competitors offering similar programs. These concerns are backed by strong evidence, which suggests that organizations utilizing incentives programs are able to hire and maintain more highly qualified workers. Furthermore, the studies suggest that positive effects on hiring and employee retention increase as the organization grows.

According to one study that we looked at, over 90% of survey respondents from organizations that have adopted incentives programs found their incentives programs to be “highly valued” by both employees and management. Additional studies show that companies with high employee and high customer satisfaction are twice as likely to view their existing incentives programs as conferring an advantage over their competition. They view these programs as important recruitment and performance management tools.

Workplace Morale

A worker that is happy and feels valued tends to value his or her work in return. And that's good for everyone! Incentives programs have been shown to increase overall morale, which leads to increased productivity in the workplace or job site.

Evidence suggests that incentivizing workers for meeting or exceeding specific goals leads them to value their work more, to be more persistent in performing tasks, to have more self-confidence, to hold their employers in higher esteem, and to seek higher levels of accomplishment within the workplace.

Incentives programs have also been shown to increase interest and enthusiasm for work and to be a strong motivating factor in helping empoyees to meet work goals. In one study, 72% of survey respondents expressed very high satisfaction with their rewards programs, while in the same survey only 8% said they would have achieved work goals without rewards-based incentives. What this boils down to is, quite simply a better, happier, and more productive workplace.

Workplace Productivity

Incentives programs help to motivate employees to do better work by tangibly demonstrating that the company values a job well done. When carefully designed and maintained, tangible incentives programs have been shown to increase work performance by an average of 22%. On the other hand, those that offer only intangible rewards—such as the title of Employee of the Month—have not shown great impact upon performance. And to back this up, in one survey only 6% of survey respondents viewed recognition as more important than tangible rewards.

Successful incentives programs lead people to actively start doing things that they may have previously resisted or neglected. They encourage commitment and persistence as well as promote mindfulness and “working smarter.”

Workplace Safety

Incentives programs can also improve performance by focusing on and promoting job safety. When employees are injured, it unsurprosingly has a negative impact on their job performance and also that of other employees. Injuries can lead to missed work and a loss in overall workplace productivity if the injured employee’s responsibilities become the burden of other employees. Incentives programs can reduce absenteeism and increase productivity not only by making employees feel valued but also by promoting a safer, happier workplace.

What should I consider when designing an incentives program?

Setting Good Goals

Most well managed incentives programs can help to create excitement and “buzz” within the workplace and studies suggest that the most successful programs are those that are centered around achieving goals that employees view as worthwhile and specific. But, most importantly, well designed programs are also focused on a goal that is achievable for all employees or participants in the program.

Programs designed to promote the accomplishment of a specific goal—as opposed to programs that are based in competition or programs that reward participants regardless of achievements—have been shown to be the most effective. Incentives programs that prioritize personal goals over competition also help employees to feel in control of their work achievements, leading to a greater push to achieve those goals. When employees feel as though they cannot keep up with the competition, they are more likely to give up.

Good goals are specific, clear, and concrete. Employees should easily understand what they are being asked to do. Ideally, participants also need to know when they are making progress toward their goal.

While incentives programs can encourage employees to try something new or to learn a new skill, studies suggest that incentives programs are more effective when encouraging people to persist at more familiar tasks. The results of these studies showed an increase in performance of 27% in these cases. Incentives programs are also highly effective when encouraging people to invest their best “mental effort,” increasing performance by 26%.

Why should I consider an online store?

The Importance of Employee Choice

Programs that allow employees to select their own rewards have been shown to be more successful and to have a greater, positive impact on the workplace than those that do not. Online Stores allow employees to select their own rewards from a pre-determined catalog of available items.

Work Designs works with your company to select company branded items or to help determine what other types of items you would like to make available to your employees. Catalog options can also be changed periodically in order to keep things fresh and generate excitement.

In addition to curated or customized selections of items, we also offer a standard catalog of hundreds of thousands of non-branded options, should your company prefer to go that route.

Easy to Track and Manage

Employees are able to purchase their incentive rewards through a points program that is tracked through the online store. As employees make progress toward their goals, points are added to their user accounts at your instruction. You can think of these points like gift cards that can only be spent on your company’s online store.

If desired, points can be set to expire upon a certain date. They can also remain with the account indefinitely, until they are spent. However, please note that incentives programs extending beyond a year are found to be 44% more effective in improving workplace performance. The longer a program runs, the greater the results!

Studies show that while over 90% of survey respondents liked their incentives systems, many were unhappy with systems that were poorly managed and cited bookkeeping errors as well as the amount of time it took to receive their rewards as major problems.

Incentives programs benefit from online stores by reducing the likelihood of bookkeeping errors. Online stores also help to facilitate the ordering process, freeing up employees to take control of how and when their incentive points are spent, so that they are not relying on others to place orders on their behalf. Users can check their current point balance at any time by logging into their account. They can also see exactly how many points are being deducted for their purchases.

If a little extra oversight is desired, an approval system can be set up so that purchases require the approval of a manager before being processed. At the company’s request, Work Designs can also run reports showing each user’s current point balance, overall points awarded, and total points spent. We can even run reports showing which items are the most popular, helping you to optimize your company’s rewards program.

Online stores put employees in control of their rewards, which helps them to feel in control of their work goals and makes it more likely that those goals are achieved.