Employee Appreciation Day

Employee appreciation day is one of the funnest events that you can plan because chances are you are planning this event for yourself or you’ve been employed somewhere in the past so you know how good it feels to get rewarded for your hard work. Actually Employee Appreciation Day is celebrated on the first Friday of March but you don’t have to wait until March to organize an employee appreciation event.

Why Employee Appreciation Day is Important?
Businesses often get sucked into day to day operations and forget to create motivation for their employees. A solution to this is to schedule a yearly day when the company focuses on its employees to show appreciation for their performance.

A Few Things to Remember
When organizing employee appreciation day make sure that there is food and lots of it. For example if you’re hosting a baseball game arrange for a hot dog stand and a snack bar that is open throughout the day. Employees will also appreciate prizes, awards or some sort of free giveaways – although according to many studies the best way for employee recognition is cash. You can substitute that with employee appreciation gifts such as coupons, credit cards to malls, stores or coffee shops just make sure that it’s something that is flexible and can be used outside the coffee shop below your office building. Nowadays you’ll find companies that are also using customers to recognize employees, here are some great examples of how they are doing it.

Although recognition awards are always great you can also arrange for a fun video to motivate and show employee appreciation by filming the bosses either saying thank you or doing something they wouldn’t normally do. Here’s a great entrance to a corporate event by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO that shows his appreciation and shows that he is “human” like the rest of the people that work in Microsoft although he runs one of the most powerful companies in the world.