I love employee appreciation events, from an employee standpoint; from an HR perspective employee appreciation events are a logistical nightmare. There’s picking a day, what to eat, what games do we play, are we giving away awards, are we closing the office if we do it on a Friday…..
I’ve worked at companies that do appreciation days by department. The managers decide when and on that day they have lunch brought in, the managers give them all a small token of gratitude for their hard work and everyone lives happily ever after.
I’ve also worked for a company that frowned on employee appreciation. The logic was employees were supposed to come to work, do their job and go home. “We pay them to do a job; I don’t care about the morale.” That was the general opinion of upper management and no amount of arguing would make them see differently.
I can attest, given this week’s disastrous attempt at an employee appreciation day, without proper planning Employee Appreciation Days can cause more harm than good. We had big plans for today, grilling and games, but things never came together. Word got around the building about the planned event and morale was crushed when word got out that it was cancelled at the last minute. You can’t have hamburgers and hot dogs without a grill, well you can but it just isn’t the same. I’m trying to salvage what little flicker of morale is left but it’s going to be tough.
Have any stories of employee appreciate days gone awry? I’d love to see them.
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My parents own a machine shop w/5-7 employees. They do something every week or so. Nothing huge, but bringing in a pizza for lunch or a plate of cookies for the break room is a fantastic way to show them you care. And the best part is they sit and eat lunch at the same table together. No segregating management from employees or hiding in the office. It’s a quick and easy “everybody in” that made the extremely difficult work a little more enjoyable.
Not exactly an “employee appreciation” event. But one company I worked for (small – about 40 staff) had monthly meetings which were usually pretty good. We all got the scoop on what everyone else was doing, i.e. how were sales that month, how many support calls, what new things were the programmers up to.
However, at this one meeting the owner decided that he should “say something” about everyone and expected his managers to do the same. After a while the owner decide that his managers were not doing a good job and them proceeded to “roast” everyone in the company.
The next month’s meeting was one manager and a couple employees less.
Did I mention that they serve beer at these meetings?
@Ben We have a small office in NY that does that. I would love to have group lunch but with an office of 75 people and a break room that accomdates 20 that’s impossible.
@Charles OMG, I bet that was hilarious from the outside looking in, until the roast. Our departments have whiteboards with similar stats and they are updated daily.