Stipends within organizations

Up § Business philosophies

These thoughts were inspired by a conversation with Jess about her plans for a Hospitality Included (no tipping) approach to her café, and the Hospitality Experience Stipend she is planning to implement to encourage and reward her staff for going to food and beverage establishments to experience examples of great hospitality, and bring back and discuss with the rest of the team.

It’s quite common to have a few different stipends within a company culture. What is a little less common, I believe, is being truly thoughtful about those stipends, to get the most out of them for the company mission, results, and culture.

Often, stipends are thought about purely to motivate individuals, without considering that there could be other outcomes of stipends. Stipends can be seen as perks, rather than of rewards for doing little extra and valuable work. In fact, stipends are a unique way to reward this type of action across the whole organization.

For example, perhaps there is a stipend or a bonus for doing 5 real customer service tickets per week. Or, when you interview a customer and report back on it. A stipend if you are actively using Buffer for your personal brand. A stipend if you maintain a blog, website, or personal brand of some sort.

When you start to consider these types of stipends or bonuses, you open yourself up to outcomes that could truly benefit the organization, through feeding it inspiration, ideas, strategy, directly, and indirectly feeding it a team and culture with higher productivity and greater understanding of and passion for the customer.