Why Employee Appreciation is Important
6 March 2025
Friday 7th March is National Employee Appreciation Day! What have you planned to enhance employee appreciation in your business? Whether you’ve selected your employee appreciation gifts or are planning something unique, employee appreciation is a fundamental part of the employee experience, encouraging HR professionals, managers, and employers to harness the power of a thank you every day of the year. This blog will explore how to craft an affordable and inclusive employee appreciation and recognition strategy in your organisation today.
Summary:
How Did Employee Appreciation Day Start?
Why Employee Appreciation is Important
What is the Difference Between Appreciation and Recognition?
Why Employees Need Both Recognition and Appreciation
Are Employee Recognition Programmes Effective?
How to Show Employee Appreciation
Effective Employee Recognition Strategies
How Did Employee Appreciation Day Start?
Employee Appreciation Day is thirty years old this year. Happy Birthday to an awareness day that brings that extra bit of joy to our working lives. Created by Dr. Bob Nelson, founder of Recognition Professionals International, in 1995, Employee Appreciation Day was a platform for promoting the release of his book, 1,001 Ways to Reward Employees.
What a fantastic marketing strategy! Today, Employee Appreciation Day reminds employers of the importance of showing appreciation and ensuring their workforce feels valued.
Why Employee Appreciation is Important
Our Employee Benefits and Wellbeing Strategy Guide reveals that 66% of employees would quit their jobs if they felt unappreciated.
Appreciation boosts employee engagement and increases motivation. Engaged employees remain a business essential, and companies with an engaged workforce deliver 147% more earnings per share than their competitors. 84% of HR leaders agree that embedding an employee reward and recognition strategy into your business boosts employee engagement, improves retention rates and helps attract talent.
Enhancing employee appreciation with an affordable and inclusive reward and recognition strategy = higher employee engagement, motivation, and retention.
When a manager or employer expresses appreciation, employees feel valued, creating a positive emotional and psychological impact. So, too, does a lack of appreciation. As positive as an employee feels when appreciation is shown, when acknowledgement is lacking or withheld, there can be an equally negative response.
Have you heard of ‘rage applying’? It has its own TikTok hashtag! Unlike quiet quitting, when employees disengage and ‘check out’ for long periods before considering resigning, rage applying is an in-the-moment, knee-jerk reaction to anger-inducing situations in the workplace. Employees who consistently feel unappreciated, undervalued, or overlooked are at a higher risk of quiet quitting and rage applying, both of which negatively impact a business.
A little employee appreciation goes a long way…
What is the Difference Between Appreciation and Recognition?
We often interchange employee appreciation and recognition in the workplace, but they’re not the same thing. Once you understand the difference, it becomes clear why both are important.
- Appreciation = valuing who an employee is as an individual regardless of any specific outcome or result. It’s an acknowledgement of their decision to be part of your company’s journey.
- Recognition = a focus on acknowledging employees’ specific contributions, efforts and achievements.
Appreciation and recognition may be different, but you can use the same platform to convey both. Employee Recognition Platforms allow you to say thank you and well done, conveying messages of appreciation and recognising success within the same portal.
Why Employees Need Both Recognition and Appreciation
1 in 4 Gen Z employees are unhappy at work, and 20% are considering quitting their jobs (Forbes, 2024). Gen Z thrives in a positive culture where their efforts are recognised and appreciated, so an inclusive employee recognition scheme is vital to retain this generation.
Are Employee Recognition Programmes Effective?
Employee recognition programmes boost engagement and workplace culture, creating a more positive employee experience. In our blog, ‘Re-Engaging the Disengaged Employee’, we highlight the benefits of a highly engaged workforce, including 59% less employee turnover.
Employee recognition programmes are effective because they streamline your appreciation, recognition and reward strategy. Where an ad hoc thank you, and gesture of appreciation are welcome, defining the parameters for recognition creates clear criteria for reward, ensuring the process is equal.
Employee recognition platforms allow for peer-to-peer recognition and appreciation - a crucial ingredient of a positive workplace experience. Without a centralised employee recognition programme in place, your efforts won’t make as much of an impact, and you’ll miss out on the tools that help you measure your strategy’s success.
How to Show Employee Appreciation
Remember, appreciation is about the person, not what they produce, so how can you show your employees that you genuinely value their presence?
- Trust and Autonomy: What better way to show your employees that you appreciate and value their worth than by giving them autonomy? Trust that they’ll contribute in a way that fits their ways of working.
- Flexibility: When you acknowledge that your employees continue to work for you in the face of other demands on their time by allowing them to fit those responsibilities around their work, you reinforce your appreciation of them.
- Let them Lead: Not all leaders have the title of 'manager' or other people beneath them. Recognise that employees are leaders within their roles - subject matter experts in their field, and your employees will understand that you value and appreciate their input.
- Host an Event: Award ceremonies are a great way to boost your recognition strategy, but you don’t need to limit events to big ceremonies. Hosting a wellbeing event, team away days or allocating a budget for a monthly meal as part of your employee experience will make your employees feel appreciated.
Are Employee Appreciation Events Tax Deductible?
We always recommend checking with your business tax advisor for specific advice. However, if you’re considering hosting employee events, you may be pleased to hear that, as a general rule, you can deduct the cost of entertaining employees from corporation tax.
Effective Employee Recognition Strategies
Having established the importance of embedding employee appreciation into your company culture, let’s explore affordable and inclusive ways to enhance your employee appreciation, reward and recognition strategy.
Rewarding employees requires a financial investment, but rewards don’t always need to be monetary. We discuss the benefits of non-financial employee rewards in our blog, '11 Examples of Non-Financial Rewards for Employees', but we’ll list a few examples to get you thinking…
- Extra time off
- Training and development
- Career advancement
- Expressing employee appreciation by making life more joyful!
The cost of doing business is high, and the cost-of-living crisis is still in the headlines, making affordability and sustainability essential ingredients of your employee reward and recognition strategy. Whether you reward and celebrate work anniversaries, career milestones, birthdays, high performance, or all these instances, you likely have a budget for employee rewards and gifts.
Is your budget working as hard as it needs to?
Cost-Effective Employee Rewards
Rewards are the next step in the employee appreciation and recognition process - a gift to reinforce your appreciation or as part of your recognition strategy.
Here’s the trick to making employee rewards impactful without breaking the budget.
Reward Vouchers
Buying eVoucher Codes for specific retailers in bulk can earn you an upfront discount, and with our Digital eVoucher Cheques, we’ll only invoice you for the vouchers your employees redeem.
You want your employees to use their rewards - that’s how they feel the lasting impact of your appreciation. Yet, experience tells us that, for various reasons - some as simple and common as forgetfulness - some employees won’t activate or redeem their reward. We don’t believe you should pay for a voucher that hasn’t been ‘cashed in’, which is why we won’t bill you for them.
Our fair and transparent billing policy = your employee rewards budget stretched further!
The affordability conversation spans beyond business budgets. When employee rewards help make life more affordable, you’re taking significant steps to enhance financial wellbeing in your workplace, boosting your employee appreciation efforts. Your employees can redeem our eVoucher Cheques with over 150 high street and high-end brands and retailers, giving your people the power of choice.
Prepaid Reward Card
Your reward can go towards a birthday gift, a meal out, a day trip, or even the weekly shop - whatever matters most to the people you’re supporting and thanking. With this theme in mind, it’s a fantastic opportunity to turn our attention to our Pluxee Card. One of our most versatile solutions, our cashback-earning prepaid card, powered by Visa, works as an employee benefit, reward, and incentive.
Make your employee appreciation strategy go beyond the initial thank you!
Instead of gifting an eVoucher, you can load cash onto an employee’s Pluxee Card, and they can then use those funds to buy goods online or in-store wherever Visa prepaid is accepted. The main advantage of rewarding employees via their Pluxee Card is that they can earn cashback when they use it to purchase goods with one of our over 80 participating retailers.
When employees earn cashback on top of your reward, it increases the value of your gift, making even more of an impact on your people. Once they have their card - also available as a virtual-only offering - your employees can add their own money to their account, increasing their cashback-earning potential and stretching their money and yours even further.
Unleash the Power of Employee Appreciation with Pluxee UK
It’s clear expressing employee appreciation every day of the year is essential, but Employee Appreciation Day is an additional opportunity to make your people feel extra special.
Ready to embed affordable and inclusive employee rewards into your business?
Whether eVouchers are your reward of choice or you’d like to explore what our cashback-earning Pluxee Card can do for your people and business, our employee engagement consultants will be happy to help. They take the time to understand your business needs and explore the best solutions to achieve your goals.
Sources: Forbes
