Celebrate Employee Appreciation Day with the gift of swag

Employee Appreciation Day gifts are one of the best ways to celebrate the people that contribute to your business’ success. We all want to feel appreciated and employee appreciation day is a great opportunity for that to happen. 

Whether bosses choose to show their gratitude by giving food, swag, or any other gifts for Employee Appreciation Day, you can’t go wrong as long as you are gifting something to show your appreciation.  Well, actually, maybe you can. 

We had a little bit of an incident with employee appreciation gifts…

The story starts with our engineering team. The engineering team always seemed to be requesting more than 2 monitors. As far as we all knew, two monitors were the standard. And in other departments, a lot of us only have one monitor. Of course, we signed off on it thinking that they needed the extra screens to view their long-winded coding schemes. We’re not engineers, and after all, we have no idea what it takes to put out the work that they do. 

We could only dream and imagine the matrix-style codes that kept scrolling forever on their surplus of monitor screens. We imagined that they all sat around the mass of monitors, with 1s and 0s just spilling across the screen. 

All in all, we ended up ordering 16 monitors…for the team of 4 engineers. It seemed practically impossible that all of those monitors could even fit in the shared engineering team office since there are only 4 desks in there. 

Seems strange, right? Well, let’s just say that the excessive monitor situation turned into a little bit of an employee appreciation problem… 

Employee Appreciation Day in the United States takes place every year on the first Friday in March. Make sure you mark this day in your calendar if you’re a boss!

There are so many ways that employers give thanks to workers for Employee Appreciation Day. Gifts are a great option. Just make sure that it doesn’t turn into the situation that we experienced… 

So one day, Bob from accounting decided he needed a reason for the excessive monitor ordering. “Why did they need all these extra monitors?” Bob wondered. He just couldn’t seem to wrap his head around it. Well a lot of us couldn’t, but Bob’s always been vocal about his suspicions with the engineering team. Especially after they corrected his math on a quarterly closing statement last year. 

The engineering team ended up telling Bob that by having 4 monitors each, they were able to get more done, faster. Oh, and now’s probably a good time to mention that these same 4 members of the engineering team at the office are also the only 4 members of the party planning committee at our work. (Kind of a surprising coincidence, we know).

Bob from accounting started to get suspicious that they were using the 16 monitors to get work done faster so that they could spend more time planning office parties. And it does make sense because when we say that these engineers take their party planning seriously, we mean it. They quite literally rented out a snow machine and wrapped every single piece of furniture in the office in wrapping paper for the office Christmas party last year. 

Bob ended up reporting his suspicions to the boss. But surprisingly enough, the boss actually loved the innovation and ended up rewarding everyone on the team for their forward-thinking. All 4 members of the engineering team got rewarded with appreciation gifts. 

The boss didn’t exactly wait for Employee Appreciation Day to show the engineering team some appreciation. As a leader, you don’t have to wait for the actual holiday to show your team that you care. Anytime you notice your employees going above and beyond, make sure to let them know that you see them and that you’re thankful for their effort.

This can be done by giving gifts to your employees as a reward or by leaving positive messages of encouragement for their hard work. Some ideas for gifts could include personalized swag for your company, employee gift baskets, personalized gourmet food baskets for your employees, or small appreciation gifts, like a plant, beverage, or even a card. Just make sure you don’t direct all of your appreciation towards one department as our boss did…

The boss rewarded the employees with unique employee appreciation gifts. The team was thrilled and their productivity seemed to go up even higher as a result (Oh, and we had a lot more office parties that year). Although they were inexpensive employee appreciation gifts that the boss was giving, it was the pure thought of appreciation for their hard work with the many monitors that meant the most to the team. 

They received personalized gift baskets with their favorite snacks, as well as some company swag. As the engineers continued to do more and more work, faster and faster, the company swag just kept coming. There were so many t-shirts, coffee mugs, and notebooks being handed out to the engineering team, that we figured the boss must’ve ordered bulk employee appreciation gifts. The engineering team even came in on casual Friday in matching red branded company sweat suits.

The gifts for employee appreciation got so out of control, that everyone else started realizing that they wanted in on the action…

When we say the employee appreciation for the engineering team got out of hand, we mean it. The boss started leaving appreciation messages to every employee on the engineering team at least every other day. And it wasn’t even Employee Appreciation Day yet!

Despite this, the team still got tons of Employee Appreciation Day words of thanks. We even found the engineers in the breakroom sharing a “Happy Employee Appreciation Day” message cake. And for every 3 Employee Appreciation Day message cards that the team received, there was an employee appreciation gift that followed. 

Everyone else at the office started to get super envious. So much so that other teams started to order surplus amounts of silly things for their own departments hoping the boss would award them something bigger. Everyone in the office wanted a gift or at least the same recognition of an Employee Appreciation Day message from the boss. By the end of this fiasco, marketing had 13 smart tablets, accounting had 42 calculators and even the front desk receptionist had 3 fax machines. Turns out that none of that worked and all of the things had to be returned. 

Showing appreciation to your employees plays a big factor in their performance. Just take this story for example. The more messages and gifts that the engineering team received, the more work they produced quickly. It was like a domino effect.

And while the rest of the office didn’t quite go about getting the boss’ attention and gratitude effectively, look at how much they were willing to do to get the boss’ appreciation…even if that just meant ordering way too many supplies. 

As a leader, setting aside Employee Appreciation Day as a day to celebrate everyone in the office will go a long way. You’ll see more productivity, better results, and just an overall more positive work environment. 

So make sure you take the time to brainstorm ideas for Employee Appreciation Day to celebrate your hardworking employees (not just the engineering team). 

Eventually, the boss realized that his excessive gift-giving to the engineering team caused a negative impact on the rest of the office. He felt really bad in the end and ended up getting everyone in the office the same gift for Employee Appreciation Day. Although after that, we did notice the engineering team's productivity went down. And they stopped throwing parties for people’s birthdays. 

The moral of the story is that employee appreciation gifts are a wonderful way to show your employees gratitude. It’s a show of good faith and can increase your employees’ overall productivity and morale. Just make sure you keep the gift-giving fair and that you don’t go overboard by showing all your appreciation to one department. 
And if you missed out in planning gifts for any occasion, SwagMagic can also help you with Last minute gifts for you.