Employee Appreciation Day Won't Save Your Crappy Culture

Donuts in the breakroom. Casual Fridays. A branded mousepad.

Your employees are tired of your half-assed attempted at engagement and appreciation.

Like an aging relationship leading up to Valentine's Day, it's true your employees are expecting you to do something tomorrow for Employee Appreciation Day. But is a half-hearted gesture likely to come across worse than doing nothing at all?

I'd say yes.

TL;DR version for busy leaders: You can - and should - show appreciation more than a single day. When you do, your team will be more dialed in which will increase productivity and reduce turnover. In other words community can be a core asset of your business that only appreciates over time. (Keep reading for proof of all that to send to your CFO.)

If all you're planning on is ordering pizza or letting people leave at 3PM, then skip it entirely and make up for it next week (more on how to do that below). But the bigger question is why you're waiting on a single day to appreciate people who make your company function the 259 other days of the year?

Four seconds of searching will reveal many ideas (some will even claim to be novel) to help you with Employee Appreciation Day. But even a "fun" idea will never make up for a toxic, disconnected, or antiseptic work culture. Snacks this Friday won't make up for a lack of appreciation and belonging come Monday.

The good news is, company leader, that you can fix a broken or crappy culture. I'd argue this should be your main focus in an era where layoffs are starting to compound yet the job market still remains tight. No one wants to work for a company whose culture is demeaning and no one stays at a company whose culture is lonely.

Here are three ways to better appreciate your workforce on a consistent basis:

1) Hold all hands meetings with time for input and a mechanism for feedback.

This year, we at Connect Gifting have begun monthly all-hands meetings as a way to close the communication gap between teams and levels of leadership. We've only got two under our belts and neither have been perfect. But, committing to these (held on the last Monday of each month) provide an outlet for company-wide announcements, as well as let any team member regardless of position or status, share thoughts, ideas, and concerns.

Better yet, all employees receive a survey after each meeting to share how they felt the meeting went and offer ideas to improve them so they can become more relevant and useful for all staff.

Lesson: if you're not listening to your employees they'll stop listening to you.

2) Develop projects and initiatives that allow for more connections across teams.

More workers feel more isolated and lonely than ever before. Sure; you can blame some of this on hybrid work environments and always-on work culture that leaves little time for true connection, but I believe employees can feel disconnected when they aren't given chances to connect that aren't directly output related.

For example, we have a company book club. That's right: I pay my employees to read. We've got big goals this year and to make those happen I'm looking for big ideas from anyone willing to weigh in. So, read a book, make $50. Once we hit a critical mass we'll begin discussion groups with formats that will drive connection.

Lesson: your employees don't just need to connect with you; they need to connect with each other, too.

3) Ok, fine, let them eat (more than once a year).

One of the fastest ways to build community? Eat together. One study cites that "the more often people eat with others, the more likely they are to feel happy and satisfied with their lives". There are several reasons for this, namely our primordial brain registers than when we're sitting to eat we're also dropping our weapons and our guard. We're at equal heights around a table. And eating is fun.

At Connect Gifting we blow through our monthly food budget quickly much to our owners' (that's me) chagrin. We have food at our monthly all hands, we have several meals when someone onboards, we bring in food during our busiest weeks, and we support and encourage all the impromptu and random happy hours anyone plans.

Lesson: people need to connect around more than conference tables.

Look; community isn't easy but it's always worth it. For almost a year I've been reflecting each weekday on how and why we should build community everywhere (especially at work). And if it takes Employee Appreciation Day to get you moving in that direction, you're off on the right foot.