Ideas for celebrating Employee Appreciation Day
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by Rick Joi Rick Joi is the founder of The Workiversary Group and author of the award‑winning book, Inspiring Work Anniversaries. |
Employee Appreciation Day is Friday, March 3rd this year.
Employee Appreciation Day is similar in spirit to work anniversaries, but with the wrinkle of being for all employees simultaneously. A lot of the ideas below will be familiar to frequent readers of this blog, but the last couple are special opportunities that make sense on Employee Appreciation Day but not work anniversaries.
Don’t let your employees go home and hear about what their spouse’s or roommate’s or friends’ company did and then have to tell them that your company did nothing!
Eat together
There is lots of evidence that eating together helps bond people together.
Here are some eating together ideas:
Lunch at the office. If you have the space and a lot of your employees can make it to the office, then have a meal at the office. Meals in the office maximize social time and make it easiest to work in a supporting presentation.
Dinner out. If your organization has a culture of going out together, then have the company pay for dinner.
Ice cream. Is a meal more than your organization can support, or are you a retail or medical organization where you can’t pull all your employees at once? Then how about delivering a snack to everyone?
Uber Eats or DoorDash. Does your organization have a significant number of remote workers who can’t make it to the office for the day? How about thanking employees by sending them Uber Eats or DoorDash vouchers. Their business accounts make this easy.
Share heartfelt gratitude
Employee Appreciation Day is a great time to express gratitude while simultaneously reinforcing the organization’s purpose, mission, and/or vision. You can thank employees for all of their contributions towards the organization achieving it’s purpose, mission, and/or vision. Providing both specific statistics and heartwarming anecdotes will help make it feel more genuine.
Here are some formats that the appreciation message can be delivered in:
(Note that for large organizations, the celebration can be broken up by department or division or location, and the highest executive will stand in where we say CEO below.)
An email from CEO. This is fairly straightforward. The message comes from the CEO in the CEO’s voice. It’s often sent in the morning.
An emailed video from the CEO. Everything said about the email above applies here, but some CEOs just prefer recording videos over emails, and for some CEOs, it will come across as more heartfelt.
A speech at lunch. If your organization is having a company lunch, then the CEO can give the speech equivalent of the email or video described above.
Social media posts. To avoid cynicism, you won’t want social media posts to be the only way you communicate the message, but together with one of the three options above
Another way to include heartfelt employee appreciation is to collect up quotes from throughout the year and share them.
Voice of the customer comments. If you have some sort of automated voice of the customer program where you get comments about your employees from customers at scale, then that can be a great source of content.
Work anniversary congratulations messages. If your organization has a Slack channel where managers share a paragraph or two of congratulations about employees on their work anniversaries, then you can collect them as a great source of content.
There are two ways to use those quotes:
An automatic presentation. If your organization is getting employees together for a meal or setting up a special snack in a common space that employees will come to, then an automatic presentation is an option. The idea is that you put one quote per slide and set the presentation up to stay on each slide long enough to read the quote, but then automatically show the next slide. It runs in the background as employees get their food and then eat and then talk after eating. It creates an appreciative atmosphere, and occasionally quotes will catch people’s attention and be the source of starting smalltalk.
A word cloud. While the automatic presentation is only useful in a couple circumstances, a word cloud is widely useful. The idea here is that you take all of the customer comments or work anniversary congratulations messages and use them to create a word cloud. That word cloud will then graphically show what customers or managers appreciate most about your employees. The word cloud can then be talked about in the CEO email, video, or speech. It can also make for an interesting social media post. (Note that if you have both customer comments and congratulations messages, then you should create two different word clouds.)
Give company clothing (or other swag)
Company clothing is one of the best work anniversary gifts and it is also the best Employee Appreciation Day gift. It’s power is it’s ability to help bond employees together into a feeling of being on the same team.
For work anniversaries, it’s generally better to go with higher-end clothing like fleece pullovers, but simple high-quality t-shirts can be appropriate for Employee Appreciation Day.
For example, to help the message of your appreciation live on, you can print up “My company loves me” t-shirts with your organization’s logo.
If you’re having a company lunch, you can give them out there. If you have remote employees that won’t be able to make it, then ideally you’ll send their’s out early. You can either plan for them to arrive on Employee Appreciation Day to make the day special. Or, you can plan for them to arrive early so that some employees wear them on the Employee Appreciation Day video call.
Servant leadership
Employee Appreciation Day is a great opportunity for a tangible, sharable examples of servant leadership.
Breakfast. The leadership team comes into the office early, brings their electric skillets from home, and makes a mess as they laugh a lot making and serving breakfast to employees. Also key to this is making sure the leadership team also cleans up. Having the assistants do that at the end will take away some of the power.
Afternoon ice cream. Does breakfast sound like too big of a commitment? Another option is for the leadership team to hand deliver ice cream or some other special treat throughout the afternoon.
Car wash. If your organization has a lot of remote employees but most of the employees live nearby, then the leadership team can try to coax employees to come into the office to have the leadership team wash their car. Note that this idea does work better in areas where it’s warm enough to wash cars on the first Friday of March.
In-person dinner kit delivery. Again for organizations that have a lot of remote employees that are relatively local, you can pick up dinner kits and deliver them in person to employees’ homes. Make-your-own-pizza and make-your-own-tacos are the two most common options, and generally there will be at least one local restaurant or caterer that will accommodate bulk orders. To make this work, generally all managers will need to be involved, though employees will be split up geographically rather than by who manages who.
Time off
We don’t recommend giving employees time off for their work anniversary, because that makes it harder for their colleagues to celebrate them.
But, Employee Appreciation Day is different and it’s always on a Friday!
If you have a company lunch on Employee Appreciation Day, then a very generous approach is to give employees the rest of the day off after lunch so that they can get a head start on the weekend.
But, if a half day feels like too much, even just shutting down an hour or two early will be greatly appreciated. Having the CEO announce the early shut down in their appreciation email to all employees goes well. It’s also helpful to include a line saying that the organization may not always be able to do it every year, but they can this year.
Conclusion
There are a lot of ideas in this blog post. There’s something here that you can do.
Don’t let wishing you could do better stop you from doing something.