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In a corporate environment, you might feel your creativity for motivating your team members is limited to kind words and small incentives. Traditional motivators include such things as gift cards and corporate swag like coffee cups and pencil holders. Larger incentives on the other hand, such as promotions and bonuses, tend to be in short supply. Here are some out-of-the-box incentives to offer your team members.
Parking
In the corporate world, especially in a heavily populated city, parking is a coveted perk in an office building. Whether you offer free parking, paid parking options, or assigned parking, there are several options you can offer to your workers as an incentive for top performances. A month of free parking? An assigned spot nearest the door? Covered parking options? These offer great appeal to many employees and can definitely be a motivator.
Split Schedule
Allowing a person to leave mid-afternoon to work from home for the rest of the day can be a tremendous reward. Often times a break from the monotony of the same schedule day in and day out is a bonus in and of itself. Allowing an employee to leave early so they can greet the kids as they get home from school, run errands, or even beat the traffic on a Friday can be especially appealing.
Personalized Gifts
A lot of employees appreciate a kind word from their boss, along with a small token such as a gift card, but you can always be a bit more creative. Instead of giving a generic gift card for something such as coffee, personalize it for that individual employee. Do they enjoy sports? Video games? A great non-fiction book? When you tailor a gift for an employee they will likely appreciate it more; even more importantly, they will take into account that you took an extra step for them, that you care and pay attention to their interests.
Motivation, despite our best intentions, is never a constant state. Everyone wants to achieve something in their life, but sometimes one can struggle with the desire to stay committed or to make the changes they know they need. Cydcor is a firm believer that getting your motivation back is key to achieving any goal. Here are five tips to help you whenever you feel stuck:
Inspiration. Find the source of your drive. Figure out what gets you fired up and in tune with yourself. It can be family, friends, music, exercise or even inspiring stories of others who have achieved a similar goal. Once you identify your source of inspiration, you can be assured in times of doubt that you know what can get you going again.
Realistic goals. One of the biggest reasons people find themselves setting up goals and not achieving them is that they set the bar too high. Don’t sabotage yourself by not being realistic. Set your major objective and have smaller steps along the way that can help you get there. Breaking it down into smaller, more manageable goals will help motivate you. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being able check off a goal from your list and track the progress you’ve made.
Anticipate. When setting your objective, anticipate potential pitfalls that might occur and create solutions before the problem arises. A study done in 2009 regarding goals found that those who were taught to foresee obstacles were able to quickly find workarounds by having a back up plan already in place. By knowing in advance of potential hurdles, those who anticipated were then mentally committed to following their backup plan instead of becoming discouraged and giving up.
Step Back. While you move forward with your goal, sometimes stepping back can help you. You can gain clarity by stopping to re-evaluating your goals and remembering why you set them. This can help motivate you to move forward, and you’ll make better progress.
Find encouragement. Make a commitment to those around you by letting them in on what you’re trying to achieve. Telling others can get them excited for you and keep you accountable. Friends and family are excellent sources of motivation because they generate enthusiasm for your project. Most people are better at keeping promises and commitments to others than they are to themselves. Committing to others can make it more likely that you will reach your goals even when faced with challenges along the way.
While Cydcor knows there isn’t one way to achieve goals and become successful, there are certain truths about a successful career that remain. Especial for those choosing a career in sales, these ten laws will guide you through to generating a good income for your clients, your company, and yourself. These laws are based on classic clichés you are tired of hearing, but there is still value behind them.
What are your laws of success? Let Cydcor know on Facebook or Twitter!
The Cydcor Community chose to review Don't Sweat the Small Stuff by Dr. Richard Carlson as a great book for personal development and stress management.
Description of this book: Dr. Richard Carlson has built a career on teaching people how to manage stress and let go of the minor pressures of a fast paced American lifestyle. This is the original in a series of books on making life happier and more manageable by not “sweating” the small stuff, and pointing out even in the subtitle “it’s all small stuff”. It is easy to get frustrated and hung up over things like bills, appointments, accidents and more hurdles in life, but the main message of this book is that stress and worry only make situations work. Training your brain to think about solutions rather than fret is a powerful lifestyle choice.
Cydcor recommends this book to leaders because: Stress can be detrimental to your health and career. Stressed out people also radiate negative energy and cause others to feel stressed or demotivated. Good managers need to learn how to project productive and positive energy in order to maintain workplace harmony. This book provides great perspective and can help you change your mental state to becoming a calm, happy and inspiring leader. The book offers easy to commit to strategies that incorporate small changes that make a huge difference.
Our favorite part: "Without question, many of us have mastered the neurotic art of spending much of our lives worrying about a variety of things all at once." Dr. Carlson writes with whimsy and clarity that makes this book easy to read and convey its message. This is one that will stick with you for life.
Cydcor is a leading sales company that specializes in face-to-face relationships and professional development. Follow Cydcor on LinkedIn or Twitter for more professional development advice.
Written by Nia Bowers
Some leaders arrive at the top of a company. Vera Quinn built her way there.
She got her start over 25 years ago as a door-to-door sales representative within the outsourced sales industry. What followed was an impressive ascent in business leadership when she joined Cydcor (a leader in the outsourced sales arena): VP of Operations, Senior VP of Sales Operations, Chief Operating Officer, President, and finally CEO in 2020.
Founded in 1994 and headquartered in Agoura Hills, California, Cydcor is a trusted provider of outsourced customer acquisition solutions. Through its network of independently owned and operated sales companies, Cydcor offers Fortune 500 and emerging brands a blend of personal connection and technology that has kept clients coming back year after year.
When Quinn took over as CEO, the world was six weeks into a pandemic that had effectively outlawed the face-to-face sales model Cydcor’s business was built on. Many companies in that position played defense. Quinn led Cydcor’s corporate team to develop and launch touchless selling technologies, equipping the network of independent sales companies with entirely new strategies for customer acquisition and enabling the business to evolve and thrive.
It wasn't a pivot born of desperation. It was the kind of move that only happens when a leader knows the machinery well enough to rebuild it under pressure.
Since becoming CEO, Quinn has led Cydcor through consistent revenue growth, expansion into new industry verticals, and recognition on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies. In 2025, Cydcor posted double-digit revenue growth for the fourth consecutive year, continued to serve long-standing clients, and saw its network scale their own businesses and develop new entrepreneurs.
Quinn talks about culture the way most executives talk about strategy as the thing everything else depends on.
"If you want great results, you have to invest in the people around you," she says. "It’s about giving them the tools, the clarity, and the belief that they can achieve more than they thought possible."
That belief isn’t decorative. At Cydcor, it operates as a management principle, one that runs through how the corporate team functions, how Cydcor approaches its relationship with the network of independently owned and operated sales companies that carry out field execution, and how it maintains the client relationships that have, in many cases, lasted decades.
"Clients stay with us because we’re consistent and because we do what we say we’ll do," Quinn explains. "They trust the integrity of our team and the strength of our network."
Cydcor has earned the DIRECTV Dealer of the Year Revolution Award for nine consecutive years. That kind of sustained recognition is less about any single campaign and more about what happens when accountability is baked into how a company operates at every level.
Under Quinn’s leadership, Cydcor has also been named a Best Place to Work in Los Angeles 13 times, a reflection of a corporate culture that doesn’t treat growth and team investment as competing priorities.
The accolades of the past few years read less like a peak and more like a confirmation of something that's been compounding for a long time.
Quinn was honored by Comerica and the Los Angeles Lakers with their Women of Business Award, named CEO of the Year by the Los Angeles Business Journal Valley Women's Leadership Awards, and was an honoree of the LA Times Studios Inspirational Women Forum & Leadership Awards - recognized for her focus on driving sustained business growth and building a high-performance, opportunity-based culture.
The Valley Women's Leadership Symposium spotlights influential leaders across the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles who are driving innovation, cultivating inclusive workplaces, and shaping the future of business. Quinn's inclusion wasn't a lifetime achievement moment, it was a recognition of something actively in motion.
Quinn also serves as Executive Director of Liberty Children’s Home in Belize extending the same investment-in-people philosophy that defines her leadership at Cydcor into work that has nothing to do with revenue targets. Through Cydcor and its network, the company’s relationship with Operation Smile has helped fund nearly 4,000 smile-restoration surgeries for children, with over $1,000,000 raised.
It's a pattern worth noting: the leaders who build durable companies tend to be the ones who aren't only building companies.
Quinn has spent more than two decades learning within the industry and leading through a period that would have broken a less prepared successor. The numbers reflect it. So does the culture. And so, increasingly, does the industry recognition that keeps finding her, not because she's chasing it, but because the results keep demanding it.
Vera Quinn is the President and CEO of Cydcor, a leader in outsourced sales headquartered in Agoura Hills, California. Learn more at cydcor.com.