employee reward and recognition program employee incentives reward incentive program EMPLOYEE REWARD AND RECOGNITION PROGRAM Employee reward and recognition programs - the Corporate Pat on the Back Employees aren’t always motivated by big fat paychecks and there is enough research done to back this up. Employees, when it boils down to it, crave for much simpler things than salaries. A book by Bob Nelson called, "1001 Ways to Reward Employees" Nelson spent painstaking years in researching all kinds of companies and also studied the behavior of various employees within those companies to gauge what motivates them and what doesn’t. It was found that is a huge disparity between what managers think motivates people and what those same employees say motivates them and the difference is indeed simple -- managers think that the employees are motivated just by their pay packets, but the employees don’t think that way, all they ever needed was recognition of their efforts and a word of appreciation.