The Power of Recurring Rewards for Service Delivery Teams

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In today’s challenging business landscape, providing exceptional service is a critical way to win and retain customers. Service delivery teams play a critical role in ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. Winning companies realize the importance of motivating and rewarding these teams’s effort. While one-time bonuses and incentives can be effective, there is a growing understanding that recurring rewards have a unique power to drive long-term performance and foster a culture of excellence. In this blog, we will explore the significance of recurring rewards for service delivery teams and how they can positively impact team morale, productivity, and customer satisfaction.

Continuous Motivation

Unlike one-time rewards, which may be done less frequently, recurring rewards create an ongoing sense of achievement and recognition. By establishing a regular rhythm of recognition and rewards, teams are motivated to consistently deliver their best work, knowing that their efforts will be consistently acknowledged and appreciated. This sustained motivation contributes to higher levels of engagement, commitment, and overall job satisfaction. These awards doesn’t have to be of significant monetary value, key things is the recognition as soon as a desired outcomes is acheived.

Reinforcing Desired Behaviors

Recurring rewards can be strategically designed to reinforce specific behaviors and performance standards that align with an organization’s goals and values. By clearly defining the criteria for rewards, service delivery teams understand what is expected of them and can actively work towards meeting those expectations. For example, rewards can be tied to metrics such as weekly customer satisfaction ratings, weekly SLA response times, or successful resolution rates. By consistently recognizing and rewarding these desired behaviors, teams are encouraged to develop habits of excellence, which ultimately leads to improved service quality.

(Shameless Plug:) We built OnRewards to enable Jira users, Project managers, Scrum masters to enable automated recurring rewards. OnRewards is a peer recognition and rewards management application tailored for service delivery teams.

Setting Up Recurring Rewards

Scrum masters are often tasked with introducing new processes beneficial to the organization. Change management in business environments can be challenging. The “Spotlight” feature in OnRewards helps scrum masters reinforce change management and can be used to influence developer behavior. 

Spotlight allows recurring rewards to be set up to run every week or month and if the condition specified is met, then the awards are automatically posted. Below is the list of supported conditions. In addition to these, a generic JQL based event is provided for maximum flexibility.

No	Reward Type	Description
1	Most Descriptive	For the selected period (weekly or monthly), counts the number of characters for chosen description fields. User with the highest average of description length is given the award. Minimum to Qualify is the minimum number of tasks to qualify for the reward.
2	Frequent Comments	For the selected period (weekly or monthly), counts the number of comments. User with the highest number of comments that also meet the Minimum to Qualify number is given the reward.
3	Most Time Logged	For the selected period (weekly or monthly), the user with the highest number of logged work hours is given the reward.
4	Most Complete	For the selected period (weekly or monthly), the user who has created the most issues with identified fields populated with values. Minimum to Qualify is the minimum number of tasks to qualify for the reward.
5	Fastest Resolver	For the selected period (weekly or monthly), the user who has the highest average resolution time (Start – End time) is given the reward. Assignee on tasks are the reward recipients.
6	Story Points Closed	For the selected period (weekly or monthly), the user with the most story points is given the reward.
7	JQL	Write any JQL to identify users.
8	Micro Award	Supported only for JQL type for now. Allows you to give a micro award (1 point) to all users returned in the JQL results.

Screenshots below highlight setting up spotlight awards

Few examples of some mundane activities but can make profound impact are

Give points to all users who respond to issues within one hour.

"Time to First Response" < elapsed("1h") AND (created > startOfWeek(-7)  and created <= startOfWeek(-1))

Give points to users who have updated their issues at the end of the week. Note that by default, the endOfWeek function considers Saturday to be the last day of the week. In this example, users who updated their issues two days before end of week will get points.

project = "XYZ" and updatedDate < endOfWeek(-2)

If you are this for, thank you so much for your reading. We would love to hear your feedback on the power of recurring rewards and using OnRewards to reinforce positive behavior.