Public employee incentive programs

This page provides a general overview of the statutes that apply to local government adoption of employee recognition and suggestion award programs in Washington State, including examples of codes and policies. Local governments, like private sector employers, may wish to acknowledge their employees, recognizing their achievements and rewarding their efforts to make government more responsive, efficient, and cost effective. Unlike their private counterparts, however, local governments must consider constitutional prohibitions against gifts if they intend to reward employees with cash, dinners, prizes, etc.

Cities and towns of all classes have authority to establish and administer employee incentive programs for their employees, so long as the program and appropriately definite performance standards are established before the period covered by the program. See AGO No. Washington authorizes first class cities, second class cities, unclassified cities, code cities, and towns. Some of these cities may be organized as charter cities under article 11, section 10 amendment 40 of the Washington Constitution, which provides:.

Any city containing a population of ten thousand inhabitants, or more, shall be permitted to frame a charter for its own government, consistent with and subject to the Constitution and laws of this state[. These differences in city and county classifications are important to your question because the legal authority of a particular city or county turns, in part, on its classification. As explained in AGO No.

The general rule is that municipal corporations are limited to those powers expressly granted to them by the Legislature and to powers necessarily or fairly implied in or incident to the powers expressly granted. Chemical Bank v. J-R Distributors, Inc.

At least as to matters of local concern, however, this general rule does not apply to cities and counties that have adopted charters pursuant to article 11, sections 4 and 10, of the Washington Constitution, respectively, or to cities operating under the Optional Municipal Code, Title 35A RCW.

These cities and counties have legislative power akin to that of the state, except that their actions cannot contravene any constitutional provision or legislative enactment. Thus, such a city or county has broad legislative power except when restricted by enactments of the state. King Cy. Public Disclosure Comm'n , 93 Wn. Yakima , 52 Wn. Program Flyer. The GYOT forgivable loan program is district funded.

It is designed to provide financial assistance in the form of loan reimburesment to outstanding Wichita Public Schools employees in a classified 0. Preference will be given to those pursuing a Special Education teaching career path. Paid time off can include everything from national holidays to sick leaves to casual leaves.

That is why some companies have started a radical new system where employees have unlimited time off. That means employees can take as many days off as they want for whatever reason and still get paid. When you provide unlimited paid time off to your employees, it immediately has a positive impact on them.

It enables them to work more productively and with more motivation. In fact, employees take less time off when they have unlimited PTO. With profit-sharing, all net profits are shared equally among all the employees involved. Monetary rewards on a profit-sharing basis help increase productivity since employees know that the better results they provide, the better their payouts.

Overall, such a model will lead to better work with more efficiency, motivation, and dedication from the employees. However, to make it work, you need to correspond with your finance department, understand the rate of growth and profits, set profit sharing percentages based on that data, and then explain the reward system to your employees. Furthermore, this model works best for small businesses. The best way to do that is to provide in-house entertainment during work hours. The idea is to create a fun work environment that goes beyond work, fosters team-building, and builds team chemistry.

You have a lot of options when it comes to in-house entertainment. You can always start off with team-building activities, at first, to make your team comfortable with one another.

You can then provide things like video games, board games, karaoke, movie nights, table tennis, arcade machines, etc. However, it would be unwise to implement everything at once.

You can get help from your human resources department to determine which employees are the best. Not to mention, it is more likely that these employees end up being loyal to you indefinitely. However, this means that you have to constantly be on the lookout for new e-Learning services that provide online courses. Eventually, they will realize that they need that training more than the company needs them to complete it.

You could also provide secondary employee rewards or gift cards as an incentive.