6 Tips for Incentivizing Your Staff to Contribute to Proposals

For many of our organizations, most tasks needed to grow happen outside of the normal working hours and require employees to contribute beyond their 9-5 role. Though their title may not have “growth” included in it, your team’s contribution can positively impact your growth. It’s important to engage employees to get a fresh perspective, new ideas, and avoid group think. But…we can all admit it’s not always easy to get our staff to do extra work.

If you’ve heard protests from your team on working late or on weekends, it likely isn’t because they’re lazy. Life is busy. We all have competing priorities and it’s important to first recognize this. Based on our experience, here is a list of six tips that will help incentivize your employees to meaningfully contribute to your corporate priorities.

1. Empower your team to meaningfully contribute.

Training is a powerful tool to prepare your employees to provide meaningful contributions to the team. Whether it’s jumping in on the proposal effort, business development and capture tasks, or conducting competitive research for the Price-to-Win strategy – knowing the proper process and best practices can build confidence with your team. Many may not volunteer because they do not know how to be useful. Providing regular training opportunities for your team will offer an immediate ROI. P.S. we can help with this!

Did you know Red Team provides private, customized training services that meets your team where they’re at? Whether they are at a beginner or expert level, billable or non-billable, or new to Federal contracting – our government contracting training can bring them up to speed in the areas needed most. Here are 6 Reasons Why Now is the Time for a Team Training.

2. Acknowledge the sacrifice you’re asking of your employees.

Employees have full lives outside of work and that should be respected. But sometimes things must happen beyond working hours, especially for your billable staff. When asking for support, verbally acknowledge and respect the time they’re giving up.

3. Praise your staff for supporting a big effort.

In short, never take your employees’ support for granted. Whether it’s verbal or company-wide praise (e.g., thank you or email shout-out), providing the group dinner, or providing individual spot bonuses, giving your team credit will have an enormous impact on morale.

4. Incorporate extracurricular support as a part of their annual goals.

If getting support is a big challenge at your company, align those tasks areas with employees’ annual goals. If they need to contribute to five proposals in one year to get promoted, we bet you’ll see more hands raised when you ask for help.

5. Keep your team apprised of company goals and pursuits.

It’s much easier to lend a helping hand when you see the broader picture. Keep your team aware of corporate goals, growth objectives, and long-term aspirations. Show how their support uniquely contributes to the success of the company. This creates meaning behind the work they’re doing.

6. Celebrate the wins – big and small!

If you win a contract, make sure to celebrate with all who supported. Let every contributor know how critical their support was and that it couldn’t have been achieved  without them.

Final Thoughts

On average, most of us will work around 90,000 hours over our lifetime. (Source: Gettysburg College). That’s a lot of time spent working and away from our families, hobbies, trips, and general non-work related interests! It’s important to let your employees know it’s all worth it – that their work is critical to the mission and bigger picture of the company.

Additional Resources:

• If a private proposal, business development and capture, or pricing strategy training is a priority for your team in 2021, please contact Meghan Quinn for more information or download our training guide.