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INTEL
Make Every Person Matter: 9 Ideas for Employee Appreciation Day 2025.
At Rippl, we’re all about making every person matter – and market-leading recognition and reward is our bread and butter. We know that for many HR and Rewards leaders, delivering meaningful recognition across deskless or decentralised teams, especially on limited budgets, can be a challenge. But, we also know effective recognition is the cornerstone behind a purpose-led, empowered workplace. So, we’re here to share a collection of meaningful ideas for Employee Appreciation Day 2025 that will drive real and lasting impact in your business and ensure every person feels seen, heard and valued in their role – whether they’re based in head office, dispersed remotely or operate on the frontline.
Let’s dive in.
Why is Employee Appreciation Day important?
When employees feel appreciated, they feel engaged, motivated and empowered to deliver more in their role and remain within the business. However, the importance of recognition is often overlooked in day-to-day workplace cultures, as many People teams are challenged with limited resources and tightened budgets. As a result, employees often feel overlooked and undervalued in their role – leading to disengagement and higher turnover. But, the power of small steps in making big changes is significant – especially when it comes to prioritising a culture of recognition. Employee Appreciation Day is a great way to reestablish or revitalise recognition in every corner of your business.
So, what’s the business impact of prioritising recognition all year round?
Employee appreciation: The business case.
- Businesses with established recognition programmes have 31% less voluntary turnover in businesses that don’t.
- Prioritising a recognition culture leads employers to be 12x more likely to see strong commercial outcomes.
- 69% of employees say they’d enhance their role contributions if they felt their efforts were more appreciated.
Employee appreciation: The people case.
- More than 6 million UK employees feel unappreciated.
- 82% are actively planning to leave their roles due to this.
- 25% of employees say lack of receiving a simple “thank you” as a significant problem in their workplace.
The growing deskless divide.
In deskless and decentralised teams, the divide continues to grow for employees who feel increasingly unseen, unheard and unvalued in their role.
- 51% of deskless employees in the UK feel they’re viewed as expendable by their employer.
- 42% feel regarded as a number, not a person.
- 90% feel they don’t have access to the right technology tools to keep them connected at work.
- 75% of frontline employees are currently experiencing burnout, rising to 83% for Gen Z employees.
- 49% of employees in majority deskless industries feel culturally divided from corporate colleagues.
- 70% of C-Suite leaders in frontline industries say they’re aware of high turnover rates in their deskless teams, but are unsure of how to address this.
9 Meaningful Ideas for Employee Appreciation Day.
How can employers celebrate Employee Appreciation Day and begin to better unify, connect and empower their people? Whether you’re just establishing an employee recognition campaign or looking for ways to elevate your culture of recognition, here are 9 ideas to spread a bit of magic and ensure everyone feels they matter.
1. Centralise a recognition community.
If you don’t have an existing recognition platform, explore alternative internal channels such as email, Teams or Slack, or celebrate colleagues more publicly on LinkedIn. What’s important is creating a centralised space that reaches all of your teams so everyone has equal visibility of how your business is marking Employee Appreciation Day and can feel valued in the celebrations.
2. Enable multi-level appreciation.
Employee Appreciation Day shouldn’t be exclusive to managers only – it’s a key opportunity to give everyone in your organisation a voice in recognising and celebrating colleagues and peers. Ensure everyone within your workforce is aware of the different ways they can recognise one another – this should step outside of solely focusing on role performance and shine a light on championing company culture, supporting others, bringing new ideas, as well as any key upcoming or recent employee milestones.
3. Launch an internal awards nomination campaign.
Get creative with a personalised theme of appreciation – can you align an awards campaign to those who best embody your business values? How about targeting awards to every team or department across the organisation? Are there some more fun and informal categories you could launch company-wide? Internal awards are a great way to elevate recognition to those who have delivered exceptional impact across the verticals you decide, whilst engaging peers to nominate one another.
4. Get innovative with rewards.
Regardless of how big your reward pot is, there are a number of ways to add a little sparkle to Employee Appreciation Day with thoughtful gestures. Whether it’s a gifted coffee or team lunch, a company social, a surprise digital voucher or an additional day off, these can go a long way in making employees feel valued and appreciated.
5. Champion the business culture.
Appreciation is most powerful when it aligns closely with the company culture. Encourage managers and team leaders to deliver values-led recognition for colleagues who effectively embody these in their day-to-day. Not only does this diversify appreciation from focusing solely on role performance, it contextualises how others can champion the core business values in their individual roles, unifying colleagues in a purpose-led and aligned workplace.
Discover how Birmingham Airport leverage recognition to align their frontline workforce with a refreshed culture strategy and core values.
6. Inspire innovation.
Authentic appreciation should go beyond a traditional ‘thank you’ or shoutout. A valued workforce is one that is listened to. Employee Appreciation Day is a key opportunity to ask colleagues what they love about working at the business and put forward new ideas for improvements – and not just exclusive to their employee experience, but wider company operations and processes to inspire innovation and ensure their valuable insights are heard.
By launching the ‘Asda Ideas’ feature, Asda can elevate insights and innovations to relevant business stakeholders to review and action.
7. Explore competitions.
A great way to unify your teams for Employee Appreciation Day is to inspire engagement with exciting prize draws and competitions. Encourage participation by asking colleagues to submit 1 recognition or award nomination to be entered into a draw, with winning submissions also shining light on who they recognised and why.
Take a look at how our Spin to Win feature puts a bit of reward magic in our users’ day-to-day.
8. Encourage senior leader participation.
To amplify the impact of Employee Appreciation Day, buy-in and participation must be championed from the top down. Whether it’s a shoutout in a company meeting, on an internal channel or on LinkedIn, ensure senior leaders and team managers actively take the opportunity to recognise their team members.
9. Amplify voices.
Similar to inspiring new ideas, another idea for Employee Appreciation Day is to open the floor for feedback. Whether it’s launching a series of pulse surveys or quick-fire polls to gauge short-form temperature checks, or enabling a long-form survey to take a deep dive into current satisfaction and morale, by amplifying voices in every corner of the business, employees will feel appreciated for their intel and feedback.
But, recognition isn’t just for Employee Appreciation Day.
Whilst Employee Appreciation Day presents a brilliant opportunity for businesses to recognise and thank their people, to truly maximise impact, a structured recognition culture should be prioritised all year round. At Rippl, we believe great things come when businesses connect, inspire and empower every person in every corner of their workforce. Whether your team majority is deskless or decentralised, we’re all about ensuring everyone feels seen, heard and valued in their contribution through a blend of dynamic and customisable features.
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Create a culture of appreciation everyday.
At Rippl, we’re all about making everyone matter. Our purpose is to unify deskless and decentralised workforces through meaningful employee engagement so every person feels seen, heard and valued. And we have over 20 years’ experience in enabling just this for leading UK and global businesses through a customised blend of recognition, rewards and benefits. Book a 30-minute slot to discover the Rippl effect as we take you on a platform tour of:
- How Rippl can be tailored to your unique business geography, needs and culture
- Our extensive feature suite including multi-level recognition, dynamic reward options, benefits dashboard and wider engagement features
- Desktop and mobile app customisation and branding capability
- Real-time data and analytics reporting to evidence impact and drive strategic decisions
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