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Employee appreciation ideas and tools for team leaders and supervisors

Oksana LavriFuture work expert14. October 20226 min read

What does employee appreciation comprise?
The importance of employee appreciation
Ideas for encouraging employee appreciation in the workplace
Platforms that allow you to appreciate employees
Summing up

Without feedback, employees will likely lose motivation and interest in their work. That’s what makes employee appreciation essential for today’s businesses.

What about you? Do you implement employee appreciation in your company? Do you have what it takes to create an engaged and motivated workforce?

Read our guide to learn about six types of staff appreciation, five strategies to try with your workplace, and tools you can use to ensure appreciation of your employees.

What does employee appreciation comprise?

Employee appreciation is the simple act of acknowledging your employees’ contributions to the business and culture of your workplace. Instead of focusing only on performance, as a team leader, you should focus on the value of employees as team members and individuals.

Acknowledging an employee for supporting other departments, helping a struggling team member with a challenging project, or mentioning your a coworker’s hard work to keep them motivated during tough times are a few examples of employee appreciation.

Employee appreciation can be divided into six categories based on three parameters:

Who is doing the appreciation?

Employees expressing appreciation to colleagues. An employee can appreciate the work of another team member or another department.
Managers expressing appreciation. Appreciation from superiors is usually governed by a company policy, according to which managers appreciate the efforts of their team members.

What are they appreciating?

Event-based appreciation. Positive feedback can be triggered by a specific event, such as a work anniversary, achievement of a professional goal, or some other exceptional achievement at work.
Regular employee appreciation. This is an expression of gratitude for work done. It is especially relevant for support functions such as IT, administration, and payroll.

How do they express their appreciation?

Formal appreciation. Employees can be recognized in email newsletters, at awards ceremonies, or similar formal events. You may also include a financial component in this method.
Informal appreciation. This can include a quick pat on the back or a shout-out in the corporate chat to other team members and is essential for motivating employees daily.

Employee appreciation through recognition is a staple in most workplaces. However, there is still a long way to go to achieving a holistic culture of well-being, engagement, and motivation.

The importance of employee appreciation

According to researchers in Australia, personality is so closely related to work that it can influence job choices more than skills, experience, or abilities. Office managers, like fitness instructors, flight attendants, and beauticians, are communicative, detail-oriented, and respectful of authority. Industrial designers, creative directors, and executive producers are excellent listeners, able to understand the needs and feelings of others.

Matching one’s profession with one’s personality leads to happiness and engagement in the workplace. Recruiters often fall into one of two camps: focus on candidates when selecting talent for a position or focus on professional skills and experience, with a particular emphasis on education, training, and previous roles. Thus, you can understand how to attract a candidate to work through personality, which is a new door to understanding the economics of the labor market.

Organizations receive rewards (like cooperation from workers, better performance, and better KPIs) when they show how they care about their workforce. These are a few advantages for organizations that implement employee appreciation programs:

Increased trust among employees and managers. Employees should feel that their managers consider them as individuals and prioritize employees’ career development, wellness, work initiatives, and important hard and soft skills relevant to do the job. According to a survey by Globoforce, 86% of employees in 2016 believed they could trust managers who had recognized them in the past month.
Greater efficiency. If your employees feel you notice how hard they work, they will invest resources in the organization’s development and will be more determined. According to Gallup, employee appreciation leads to the engage. Engaged employees are involved in, passionate about, and committed to their work and workplace. Willis Towers Watson highlights that when employees are engaged, they are more likely to desire to contribute to the company’s success.
Diminished turnover. The cost to replace an employee can be from half to two times the employee’s salary. For example, losing an employee with an annual salary of $80,000 can cost an organization up to $160,000. Employee appreciation is another way to reduce employee turnover. Companies with higher engagement and staff appreciation have a lower turnover.
Stronger brand reputation. A Glassdoor survey found that most companies fell short in employee appreciation. Due to this, fewer than 50% of employees would recommend their employer to a friend. Zeynep Ton, professor of MIT Sloan School of Management, explains in her book “The Good Jobs Strategy” that employee appreciation is essential. Business leaders should give their workforce more decision-making power and support them. This will make a company more profitable, as buyers like to support organizations that treat their employees well.

Ideas for encouraging employee appreciation in the workplace

Recently, researchers analyzed 100,000 posts of Twitter users in Australia by feeding them into software that measures linguistic patterns for happiness and well-being, including details such as quality of relationships and engagement with life.

The analysis found that people whose personalities are closely aligned with their work have much higher levels of engagement and higher levels of happiness. This suggests that people don’t join certain occupations by chance but because their biological predispositions lead them to occupations for which they are well suited. Here are ideas you can try to encourage employee appreciation in the workplace.

Try gamification to enhance your motivation and reward structure. According to the TalentLMS gamification survey, 83% of gamified learners feel motivated and appreciate their workplace more, while 61% of non-gamified learners feel bored and unproductive. Marketers use gamification to drive engagement, extend lifetime value, and more. In HR, you can place gamification at all levels, from recruitment and onboarding to employee engagement and training. It will help your employees see that you appreciate their work and want to help them develop.
Implement the fun element. Communicate with colleagues. Elements of fun are useful. For example, you can start a meeting with a small game or prompt that encourages people to have a deeper conversation and synchronizes their thinking and emotions. Positive social interaction is essential for individual well-being and for building a culture of empathy, trust, and cooperation.
Provide growth opportunities. Employees will feel genuinely respected and appreciated if their organization provides them with opportunities for growth and development, especially after doing a great job. Growth and development opportunities make workers loyal to their organization, create a solid employee-employer relationship, and help employees perform better.
Reward your employees based on individual interests. Saying “I appreciate you” really works, but it’s not enough. Express this gratitude uniquely to each person in your team or company. Sure, try a standard general reward to show how much you appreciate an employee; the best way to do it is to find out what an employee’s hobbies are or what they want most.
Create an atmosphere of trust. Don’t micromanage employees. It makes them frustrated, demotivated, and disloyal. Better to give them more trust and responsibility in their work. This will help them believe that their independent efforts are rewarded and that the company trusts them.

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Platforms that allow you to appreciate employees

Tools for employee appreciation help you improve workers’ engagement and build a staff appreciation strategy. Such tools help you manage abstract human concepts like employee satisfaction and relationships with the same focus and effectiveness as you manage project timelines and sales targets.

In the hands of thoughtful colleagues and managers, employee recognition software can improve your company culture.

Fortunately, there are many options for staff appreciation software. Check out our list of employee appreciation tools to take the first step towards optimizing your workplace culture.

MyAdvent. This tool helps you plan and celebrate various events and involve workers in active actions. For example, the HRForecast team used MyAdvent to introduce team members to each other through a game over a month — sharing favorite songs about Christmas and New Year’s and sharing how everyone decorated their houses for the holidays.
Guusto. This is one of the funniest staff appreciation tools to help create digital gift cards for your employees. You can modernize milestone rewards, give managers the ability to send rewards, or create robust peer-to-peer appreciation programs. Guusto makes it easy to reward outstanding work and consistently builds workplace culture.
smartPeople. This talent management tool helps you create a strategic workforce upskilling plan for your workers and build an employee-centric business process. You or your managers can detect and understand the future skills relevant to your industry and translate them into future job profiles. You can set upskilling targets and align them with future-oriented job requirements and business goals, allowing workers to develop within the company and gain new knowledge without moving from one company to another.
Quizizz. This tool is perfect for increasing staff appreciation. With its help, you can involve employees in training exercises and new systems at work. Quizizz has gamification features and interactive learning materials such as leaderboards, live videos, live chat, and quizzes.
Moodle Cloud. This learning management system (LMS) can help you increase staff appreciation. Moodle Cloud enables your company to conduct e-learning among employees. With this platform, you can train marketing or sales teams to explain a new product or service and conduct a survey on the material.

Summing up

Appreciating employees benefits your business. It builds trust, and your business will work more efficiently if employees trust you.

Everything is connected; satisfied employees are more loyal to the company and engaged in their work. If employees feel you care, you will see how hard they work. Valued employees are invested in the company’s success and will put in more effort. Contact us for specific advice on how you can express employee appreciation in your company.