How to Plan for Employee Appreciation Day

Employee Appreciation Day falls on the first Friday of March EVERY YEAR! It’s never to early to start planning how you want to spend the day recognizing your hard-working employees, but who should you involve?

Human Resources: We suspect many of our readers are in an HR function, so this means you! Send an email about Employee Appreciation Day or mention it in your next leadership meeting to get the wheels moving. However your company decides to celebrate, they’ll likely need your stamp of approval. Avoid last-minute emails and questions by planning ahead.
Leadership/Ownership: The more buy-in you have from leadership, the more your employees will end up feeling appreciated and recognized for their hard work on Employee Appreciation Day. It’s one thing for peers to celebrate each other, but the additional recognition from leadership is proven to be more memorable. It’s fun for employees to see the more “human” side of their leaders.
Culture Committee: If you already have a committee in place, consider yourself one step ahead of most companies. Utilize this team to brainstorm and weigh in on what employees will find valuable – after all, the committee is made up of the employees you are looking to celebrate! It doesn’t hurt for the leadership team or HR to contribute a few ideas of their own or to at least provide a budget.
Management: Most employee engagement issues correlate with frustration with management teams. Here’s your chance to include management on your Employee Appreciation Day plan and most importantly, to set expectations. If you’re having a catered lunch, your managers better be there — and stay. Managers can help generate excitement leading up to and throughout the day. For best results, don’t put all of the work on the culture committee.

Here at Boost Engagement, we think it’s important to appreciate your employees all year long, which is why we developed a number of employee engagement and recognition solutions to help organizations of any size.