Small businesses are often challenged with striking a balance between offering employee loyalty incentives and controlling costs of these very incentive programs. Often some of the most meaningful mechanisms for boosting and maintaining employee loyalty are also the most cost efficient. Here are three easy, low-cost ways to ensure your employees remain loyal for years to come.

Reward Them With Time Off: Offering hard-working and dedicated employees with extra time off in an ad-hoc fashion isa really effective way to keep employees on their toes and make them feel like their effort is appreciated by management. By giving employees a random day off after a long project or a particularly stressful stretch of time, will help keep them motivated and working hard on a long-term basis, since they never know when management may reward them. To employees, time off is extremely valuable and an extra vacation day to take a long weekend can be a great way to de-stress and re-motivate an employee to return to work with new energy and new perspective. Since there is no upfront cost for this type of employee loyalty incentive it can also be a great way to help control employee loyalty program costs.

Give the Right Incentives: When designing employee loyalty incentive programs ensuring that the incentives provided are meaningful to employees is critical. If the incentives do not motivate employees, then employers will not get the ROI they seekand the incentives will not have perpetuated the desired employee behavior. Offering incentives that are flexible and can beadjusted to different employee tastes, with equal value, is the most effective and cost efficient solution. Gift cards can offer flexibility on experience while the cost remains the same. Being able to offer a diverse variety of gift card brands such as Speedway, to alleviate fuel costs, or Boston Market, to help a working mom take care of dinner one night, or Crutchfield, for an employee who may be looking to make some home improvements, provides an experience for every individual employee, while management can maintain the cost.

Open Door Policy: Giving employees access to senior management is a great way to show appreciation for a job well done orfor reaching milestone anniversaries with the company. This shows both acknowledgment for loyal employees, making them feel appreciated by the organization, while also allowing them to give valuable feedback to management from an employee perspective. The open door policy is mutually beneficial to both parties. Some employees may also view the opportunity to pick the brain of a member of senior management as a unique career development opportunity, which is both valuable to the employee’s personal career goals and also helps an organization grow from within. Since this only costs the organization time spent, it can be a great way to provide a meaningful employee incentive experience while controlling internal costs.

Rachel Merkin is a digital marketing professional . She has been exploring the worlds of social media and B2B gift cards since 2006. When she is not blogging, tweeting, or finding ways to leverage Facebook as a marketing tool, she spends as much time at the beach as she can.