Jobhop Jobhop's blog : 6 Workplace Celebrations That Should Be Celebrated

Workplace celebrations bring people together, companies should look positively upon celebrations as a chance to further engage employees.

If your company has a non celebratory culture then it would be rather strange if all of a sudden you started forcing your employees to celebrate everything, it will have to be a gradual process. The reason why your company cannot go from celebrating nothing to celebrating everything is that it just wont feel authentic, many employees may even be very cynical about it. If you think that this sounds like your company then take it step by step, perhaps start an employee recognition award or a quarterly celebration for best department sales, just don’t try and celebrate everything at once.

Once you get into the swing of awarding and celebrating here are six workplace celebrations you can put out the balloons for.

Business anniversary

You should celebrate your business anniversary every year. This is a chance to bring your employees and your clients together to toast another successful year in business. This is where you can reinforce the company story, chat about plans for the future and seriously network to continue establishing strong, loyal relationships. Remember the big years that end in an “0” 10, 20, 30 40, 50, 60 , 70, 80, 90, 100 and more, as well as 25 and 75! Get creative with your business anniversaries, have a special anniversary logo, give away some prizes, produce a PR piece for the papers around the highlights of those years in business.

Employee Birthdays

This type of celebration should be done tactfully, if you’ve employed for culture first then you’ll know if your employees like celebrating birthdays. Let’s just go with that, you know your employees love to celebrate and would definitely like some balloons on their birthday, now to decide on what colour balloons!

It doesn’t have to be a costly event every time someone has a birthday, just a balloon tied to their chair and a cupcake and a candle to blow out will be suffice, as long as everyone sings “Happy Birthday to you” One piece of advice would be to never forget someones birthday once you start, that could really hurtful to the person who you forget, they’ll say they don’t mind, but they will.

Holidays

This is a tricky one because your company may have a team of people with different religions. You need to be clear right from the beginning which holidays your company celebrates. Holiday celebrations will always add a certain buzz to your company, Halloween, Valentine’s, Easter, St Patrick’s Day, St George’s Day, Christmas and New Year, I’ve probably missed a few.

Celebrate with decorations, fun photos, make a fun video, festive mugs and sweets, again it doesn’t have to be an expensive event.

Employee appreciation day

Employee Appreciation Day is always the first Friday in March so put the next one in your diary now. Even though you should appreciate your employees every day it’s great to have a special day to celebrate.

Let them come to work as their super heroes for the day, make sure cake is on the menu and put up a big “Thank You” banner

Major Milestones

You and your employees are all on a journey together and along the way you will have major milestones, these need to be celebrated, they’re huge accomplishments.

A milestone could be your first 500 followers on Twitter, when the company achieves its target turnover, when you take over a new area or get a license in another country, these are all milestones that have been set to reach and when it happens everyone should celebrate having achieved them. Remember, sometimes the journey is challenging, reaching and celebrating milestones along the way is acknowledging what’s been conquered en route.

Launches

Whenever a new product or service comes to market everyone should be involved in the launch celebrations. It’s another success which your employees can talk about and everyone should be part of the celebrations, theres nothing worse than putting all the work in and then not being invited to the party! If you only have enough budget to hire a swanky place out for potential customers and journalists, then make sure the launch gets live streamed back to the office where everyone can have their own launch party. There’s never an excuse not to have a celebration, everything should be celebrated where ever possible.

So what celebration are you going to plan first?

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Jule Bishop Jobhop.co.uk

Pic credit Helen Overland

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