Marketing Director
With Employee Appreciation Day fast approaching on 4th March 2022, it’s the perfect day to thank your valued team members for their contributions at work over the last year.
Whilst we encourage our clients to celebrate this day with their teams internally, it’s important to recognise that showing appreciation should be classed as standard daily practise – acknowledging colleagues for both their small and big achievements – and as a result, creating a great place to work!
Why show your employees appreciation?
We all know that when employees feel appreciated and valued at work, they are:
- more engaged with the business and its objectives
- more productive, effective, and satisfied at work
- highly driven and motivated to succeed for the business
- happy and actively promote the business as a great employer brand
The only barriers to making appreciation commonplace across the business are the well-known constraints of time and money. However according to a survey completed by RewardGateway, 70% of employees reported that a simple thank you would be enough to motivate them.
So, creating a culture of continuous recognition doesn’t have to be taxing, In fact, small and simple ideas can really make the difference to your colleagues, without adding pressure to your schedule or breaking the bank. With the rise of hybrid working, it’s important to also think about how to recognise remote employees specifically too.
5 ways to showing employee appreciation:
- A simple thank you.
This could be an email, a face-to-face conversation, or a handwritten note. If you are feeling creative, sign up to a graphic design platform like Canva, and create a visual or ecard to express your thanks. The platform is free to use and has ready made templates for you to personalise. This is a great way to show appreciation, especially to those remote workers.
- A company-wide ‘shout out’
It’s always nice to receive recognition in front of your peers and senior colleagues. At the end of the meeting, give a shout out to your colleague who went the extra mile to help you and no doubt they will be receptive to helping you out in the future. Or ask for a small space in the internal company newsletter, and make your colleague feel extra special.
- Find out your co-workers interests and treat them
Get to know your team members and find out what appreciation looks like to them individually. This could be a voucher for their favourite restaurant, a ticket to a sporting event or theatre, a prepaid beauty treatment, free coffee or a bottle of wine. For remote colleagues, why not send them something directly to their home – everyone loves receiving post or an unexpected delivery!
- Time off
This incentive may need to be used sparingly depending on the workload of the team, but offering employees incentives such as duvet days, long lunch breaks, or the ability to finish work an hour or two early for a week, could really help show appreciation for their work, whilst enhancing their work-life balance at the same time.
- Dedicated incentive days
It’s important that when targets are met or exceeded, that employees feel recognised and therefore motivated to exceed performance expectations again. So setting out pre-planned days out of the office in the diary perhaps once every quarter, that are dependent on meeting objectives, is a great way to make employees feel both motivated and appreciated at the same time.
We pride ourselves on our highly considered and consultative approach to recruitment allowing us to quickly understand both clients and candidate requirements. As a consequence, we are consistently successful in placing the right candidate in the right role. Contact us or submit an enquiry to us directly, and we will be in touch to help with your recruitment needs.
