How can you get your managers — the very people who will be rewarding your employees and salespeople — more involved in using reward programs? Here’s a hint: Think about rewarding them. That’s right, reward the rewarders!

The promises you are making throughout your communications — that using the reward programs will help your managers become better managers — should be enough to get all of them fired up about their role in the recognition process. But it might not be. You’ll also want to appeal to their competitive nature. After all, what gets reinforced and measured gets done.

Whats the best approach? Consider ranking them based on their recognition activity and take special steps to celebrate those who have outperformed their peers. You can tie in tangible rewards (like aspirational merchandise or a group travel program) and aim them at managers who have used the tool to drive performance across meaningful measures.

And while you are rewarding managers who are benefiting from the program, you can simultaneously use another communication stream to re-enlist any laggards who are slow to embrace it. That dual approach will give your overall communications strategy more impact. Let me explain. Behavioral economics teaches us that people — no matter who they are or what they do — are influenced more by their peers than anything else. Here you can use those newly captured, real-life examples of managers who have recognized employees (and as a result are achieving better outcomes) as a compelling proof-of-concept for any skeptical under-performers that remain.

Of course, managing all of this is easy with Maestro. The system gives you all the tools and information you need to reward rewarders, track utilization and/or take decisive steps to improve the uptake of any managers who still need a little nudging.