Spread Love: Employee Appreciation Day
It’s the first Friday of March, so you know what that means — Employee Appreciation Day!
First established in 1995 by Recognition Professionals International with the belief that, “Personalizing recognition can create a memory and those memories build higher performance. Recognition can take a hundred forms and variations.” As you can see, employee appreciation and recognition has been on the hearts and minds of business owners and professionals now for over two decades.
Researchers David Sturt and Todd Nordstrom (O.C. Tanner Institute) state that, “…lack of appreciation is the number one reason people leave jobs (78%). We know that appreciation is the number one thing (37%) people say causes them to do great work.“
It can be a source of stress for managers to convey genuine appreciation to employees on a nationally appointed holiday. Duly, choosing to not celebrate the holiday can have disastrous effects on morale, and even worse, create a schism between employer-employee relationships. “But, every March, this relatively new holiday appears, creating an awkward situation for employers and managers that elicits some interesting questions and answers.”
If you’re struggling to figure out how to show appreciation, you must first be honest with yourself. Honest in the fact that you’re business is thriving due to the inter-dependency of relationships among your team. This is a sentiment that should be celebrated year round and not only internally, but externally as well — business owners can often forget they are doing business with people NOT organizations.
Many employees adopt a “cog in the machine” role in order to support the larger function of a business or organization, however, we’re not machines. Employees require more than regularly scheduled maintenance and performance reports. Like all living organisms we require nourishment in order to grow, and what better way to build and grow a flourishing company than by practicing gratitude.
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others – Marcus Tullius Cicero
Office Vibe conducted a survey on employee recognition and from the results created an infographic explaining 11 Things You Didn’t Know About Employee Recognition.
