Last Minute Employee Appreciation Day!
Ideas you can throw together in 1 hour for last-minute success
Okay, so you forgot that it is Employee Appreciation Day tomorrow (Friday, March 3). So what, you can throw things together, don’t forget who you are! It was literally just New Year’s and you finally found your rhythm. You still have that rhythm, only now, it is staccato, improve, jazz.
Take a breath and follow these steps. Some will work for you and some won’t; skip to what makes sense for your situation.
Executive Message: Get the founder of the company to draft a personal message of appreciation that should go out in the morning. Very important that someone from leadership show appreciation to set the tone for the importance of the day.
Appreciation Storm: Hand off the reigns of appreciation to your colleagues. Get your colleagues to show love to their coworkers too!
In the morning, send out a message in Slack/Discord/Google/Teams, etc. requesting an appreciation storm at a certain time. Here is an example:
@channel Hi Team! In honor of Employee Appreciation Day, I want to say from the bottom of my heart how honored I am to work with you all! There are so many people that make this team what it is and wanted to open up the floor to do an appreciation bomb!
So at 12pmET, we want to see who can send out the most appreciation messages to their colleagues, tagging the person they are appreciating! The person that sends out the most posts between 12ET and 1pmET will be entered into a giveaway to win a year’s worth of ice cream from your favorite creamery!
An iteration of this is to have colleagues post their favorite photos from work events! This will also help you gather more internal team photos for any future projects and have employees reminisce in appreciation for knowing one another.
All of these are subject to be customized!
Virtual gift: If you have the budget, do a virtual gift like a gift card, or lunch stipend (remote workforce). Places I can count on: Doordash, Goldbelly. Look into any that are relevant to your company (City-specific, inside joke specific, company mission/value aligned).
In-person: If your coworkers are in person, order a sheet cake from your local grocery store (they are great at being last minute over a niche bakery). And have them write: Happy Employee Appreciation Day! If they don’t have a sheet cake large enough at the last moment, then order like 5 different styles of cake (however many!) to feed everyone and honestly, it will look like you were accounting for the many dietary needs of the team.
Because a party without a cake is just a meeting. And this isn’t a meeting, it’s an appreciation day!
Don’t Celebrate it: If you don’t like to be rushed and want to plan an appreciation day at a time of your team’s choosing, check out this appreciation day ideas post I wrote! Because celebrations that happen off-schedule are way more impactful and memorable anyway when you can plan them out intentionally and on your own timeline.
Hope these ideas help you look like you know what you are doing at your job!
Good luck <3