Celebrate Labor Day within Your Organization
By long tradition, Labor Day is a yearly national tribute to the contributions that our country’s workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of America. It marks the unofficial end of summer and the beginning of a new business year, as well as the start of school in some parts of the country.
But most companies do almost nothing internally to celebrate the contributions of their workers—the key ingredient in any organization’s success. Unlike Independence Day, Thanksgiving or New Year’s Day, there aren’t any established rituals that companies can share with their employees—no summer picnics, food drives or holiday parties.
With Labor Day 2014 fast approaching on September 1, here are some ideas to recognize and reward your organization’s workforce:
- Schedule a surprise “break time” during the day and have the senior leadership team deliver a small gift to employees (food, beverage, flowers, gift certificate, etc.)
- Hold a Labor Day trivia contest with prizes for the top winners. For instance, you could send out an email at the start of the workday and give employees 30 minutes to send in their responses. Hint: try to find a few questions that won’t pop up immediately on a search engine!
- Organize an informal run or walk around the company building (weather permitting.) Since it’s a Labor Day event, you could make it a little more challenging than usual, such as going up and down a flight of stairs or “laboring” along rough trail.
- If your company has been around for more than a decade or two, you could have senior executives dress up as “typical” employees of the 1970s, 1950s or 1890s. Be sure to have lots of cameras in place to capture the images for social media.
- Hand out a small cash “bonus.” For most employees, nothing says “thank you” like a little extra spending money. If your organization’s budget has a little flexibility, you could hand out $1, $2 or $5 with small card from the CEO, or even a gift card to a local coffee shop.
Because Labor Day doesn’t have a well-established tradition, you can exercise your own creativity to come up with an idea to engage your workforce and show that you sincerely appreciate their contributions to the organization.
