Employee incentives have always been an effective way of improving performance and productivity levels, and the best rewards campaigns have a direct effect on your company’s overall profitability level. But your rewards program can be an expensive endeavor, both financially and in terms of time and effort spent making sure it is operating to the best of its ability.

Understandably, most organizations are reluctant to commit to an expensive system that draws money from a budget already being used as giveaways or performance-based incentives, and rightly so. With technological developments providing organizations with a multitude of resources when it comes to every aspect of employee transition, your rewards program can benefit from a modern update, too.

Technology has allowed HR departments to use people analytics and metrics to determine the typical response to certain rewards, and which strategies have proven to increase engagement and productivity. While we’re depending on computer systems to create our rewards programs, we should also be depending on them to allot and assign rewards, too.

Employee onboarding software allows new hires to get to grips with the rewards program straight away, providing tools that make contracts and guidelines easily and readily available. When it comes to data entry, you can fully optimize all your resources by using form and template apps to quickly whip up applications and shoot them off to talent, who are then able to complete and return them at a faster rate than ever before. These files are kept secure on a private database, and can be found for reference by those who you want to have access, and not by those who you haven’t granted it to.

Of course, modern rewards incorporate many different aspects that traditional compensations don’t. Perhaps your company has chosen to award concert tickets, gift cards or other rewards that aren’t strictly cash but still cost the company something.

Executives often invent creative ways to reward employees, which is a great way of improving engagement and productivity, but it can often seem to HR that managers are making up the rewards system as they go along. With company policies outlined clearly in your onboarding software, both employees and executives will be fully aware of the organization’s guidelines when it comes to rewards. Budgets, regulations and precedents can be made aware to new hires during onboarding orientation, and everyone will have easy access to it whenever they need it.

This cuts down on the amount on inquiries HR has to deal with from other departments, and software search tools mean answers are just a few clicks away.

Whatever your incentive program is, it must be executed with a level of professionalism to ensure it isn’t abused, misused or even under-used by departments that could really benefit from it. Using an onboarding program that can engage employees with your rewards system early leaves them fully engaged with current company policies, and provides back-up for HR and all other executives when they need it.