Dubai: A Dubai government entity says it has a surefire way to make employees who may be demotivated and lagging in their performances as a result turn around their performance graph and serve their company’s clientele that much better.
The Community Development Authority (CDA) in Dubai on Sunday unveiled its Happiness Points programme that encourages its employees to excel at the workplace and actually improved the overall service at the agency.
CDA showcased the Happiness Points programme, along with many other schemes, as part of Dubai International Government Achievements Exhibition (DIGAE), in an effort to scale up the project and allow other agencies to implement it as well.
“This programme is very important because we are looking for a happy society. If your employees are not happy, it will reflect in the workplace and in their performance. The message here is, if we take care of our people, they will take care of the business or of the clients,” Saeed Al Tayer, CEO of Social Planning and Development Sector, told Gulf News.
“This is to give credit to someone who is excelling at his job. At CDA, we try to push and encourage our staff to go beyond what is expected of him,” he added.
Al Tayer said the points system is an internal programme that has been running for one year. The CDA decided to announce it publicly on Sunday because of the benefits the authority reaped for the past year as reflected in the improvement in employee productivity from 72 per cent to 93 per cent.
“The programme really changed the environment in CDA. A lot of employees now try to work harder because they are seeing their colleagues, even newcomers, even interns get a chance to be rewarded.”
How it works
The human resource department gives each department head and CEO three vouchers every month to give randomly to deserving employees. Each voucher can be 50, 30, or 20 points.
Employees can collect points and redeem them in the form of a spa treatment, a new gadget, a hotel stay or an all-expense paid trip to a destination of their choice, depending on the points they collected.
Someone who earned 50 points, for example, received a hotel stay in Dubai Marina. Another employee who got 170 points got the chance to head to Sri Lanka for a three-day holiday.
Hala, an employee at CDA, said the rewards system is a good initiative. “It feels good because I got the reward from the director-general himself. It’s not about the reward per se but it’s about the psychological effect it brings, because you know your work is appreciated. My mum kept talking about it for too many days, so I felt really proud.”
