7 Ways to Celebrate Employee Appreciation Day

Employee Appreciation Day is right around the corner, on March 6, 2020. Your team deserves to be recognized for the hard work they do for your company, so if you forget to celebrate them on this day, you might have a few unhappy campers on your hands!

While we believe that employee appreciation shouldn’t be relegated to a single date, here are some tips on how to make this Employee Appreciation Day memorable for your whole team.

7 ways to celebrate your employees

1. Extended lunchtime: Give your team an extra-long lunch break to relax, recharge and feel appreciated. Better yet, pair this idea with one or two of the following for an extra special Employee Appreciation Day event.
2. Handwritten thank-you notes: Write personalized notes to each of your team members detailing the impact of their contribution to the organization. To make it a game, type the note in code and have your team try to break it together.
3. Awards: Create awards for each member of your team. They can highlight professional and organizational accomplishments. Or they can be more creative and fun and showcase your company culture. Who would win for "Top Coffee Connoisseur"?
4. Boardgame tournament: Ask your team to bring in their favorite board game and spend part of the day having some well-deserved fun. You could even start a team tournament to encourage a little healthy competition.
5. Thankover: What's a Thankover? Throughout the day, use your office speaker system to play celebratory songs and thank your employees for their efforts. This is a great way to acknowledge individual accomplishments in a fun, public way.
6. Out-of-office activities: If you really want to have a good time, take your team out for an afternoon or evening adventure. What you do is completely up to you and the makeup of your staff. A few ideas include bowling, laser tag, and karaoke.
7. Charitable Giving: Which causes and charities do your team members support? How about making donations on their behalf? This idea has two benefits: you show your appreciation for your team and you make the world a better place. It’s win, win!

These ideas are just the tip of the iceberg. If you sit down and think about it for a minute, we're sure you'll be able to come up with a ton of amazing ideas. Once you do, let us know about them in the comments!

Employee Appreciation Day best practices

Knowing how to celebrate your team on Employee Appreciation Day is one thing, actually doing it effectively is another. Be sure to keep these three best practices in mind as you gear up for your big celebratory event next week:

• Appoint an employee appreciation ambassador (or a group of folks) who will be in charge of organizing your company's celebration plans.
• Make sure your managers are on board with your plans and are willing to participate. This will encourage and engage the entire team.
• Survey your employees once your celebration is over so that you can gather feedback and build on your success in future years.

How Kudos makes Employee Appreciation Day better

While planning an epic Employee Appreciation Day celebration might sound like a lot of effort, it's definitely worth it! Recognizing your staff's contributions with a fun office party can boost engagement, which has been proven to reduce turnover and improve performance.

Plus, a platform like Kudos will enable you to plan your event quickly and easily. Here's how our platform can help:

Get the word out

Kudos makes it a piece of cake to get the team on board. Here are a few tips:

• Create a document and post it in Pages to provide full details of the initiative — include details like a schedule of the day, any special events and instructions.
• Let the team know! Use the Kudos announcement widget to notify the team of Employee Appreciation Day. Continue to push out announcements in the days leading up to your event.
• Add the day and event to the calendar. Create an event so it shows up on the wall, in the calendar and has the details the team needs.

Other communication formats

• Posters: Create your own fun posters to post in the image widget or print off and post in common staff areas.
• Photo albums: Commemorate the occasion by posting photos of the day with an appreciation message and upload them to Albums on your Kudos site.
• Kudos banners: Update the theme of your Kudos site with an Employee Appreciation Day banner.
• Desktop wallpaper/screensaver: Create a desktop/screensaver for the day so your team can feel appreciated the moment they turn on their computer.

Recognize your employees

Employee recognition is Kudos' bread and butter. So, our platform includes many ways for management to recognize employee achievements, and for employees to reward and celebrate the accomplishments of their coworkers.

During your Employee Appreciation Day celebration, you can use Kudos to award your team points. If you use rewards on your Kudos site, they can then redeem their points for physical rewards like gift cards or other benefits like a half-day off or a better parking spot.

Kudos also has real-time feedback capabilities. This feature can be used pre-event to get answers from your team regarding questions like who's the "Top Coffee Connoisseur?" Then you can award Kudos points to the winner, as we mentioned above.

Make the most of Employee Appreciation Day

Employee Appreciation Day is right around the corner. But don't worry, you now know how to celebrate your team effectively and ensure they feel valued for the hard work they do. Whether you decide to extend lunchtime, hand out awards, or something else, make an effort to recognize your team on March 6th. They'll appreciate it, guaranteed!

Talk to us about year-round employee appreciation

Don’t forget that Kudos can not only assist you in creating buzz around this special day ,but it can also make every day feel like employee appreciation day.  Click on the chatbot at the bottom right to get the conversation started.

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