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Bonuses Most Common Employee Reward

October 11, 2011

Nearly three-quarters of employers use bonuses as a means to reward employees, according to results of the 2011 BenchmarkPro survey from Compdata Surveys, a pay and benefits survey data provider.

According to the survey, 70 percent of companies offer bonuses to reward employees. Forty percent offer incentive pay, and spot incentives are used by 24.2 percent of organizations. Meanwhile, team incentives are used to reward employees at 14.7 percent of organizations. Companies use skill-based pay at a rate of 13.2 percent, while key contributor rewards are used the least, 6.5 percent.

“The rate of use for most reward practices has seen very little change over the last few years,” said Amy Kaminski, director of marketing for Compdata Surveys. “As baby boomers retire and take their skill sets with them, however, that may change. The use of skill-based pay, for example, may start to increase as employers look to reward and retain employees possessing unique skills which may be hard to come by as boomers leave the workforce.”

Rewards often vary by industry as 84.1 percent of services organizations offer bonuses to employees. Bonuses are used by 79.2 percent of hospitality companies, compared to those in manufacturing and distribution, 78.1 percent. Fifty-three percent of healthcare organizations offer bonuses, while they are offered in utilities the least, 44.2 percent.

BenchmarkPro 2011 contains cross-industry data on more than 300 benchmark job titles. Data was collected from nearly 3,700 employers reporting for more than 18,000 locations across the U.S.