Award Presentations Make a Year-End Recognition Event Memorable
The company year-end party is often the most anticipated employee recognition event of the year. Employees look forward to an evening full of camaraderie outside of the workplace all year long. The year-end recognition event is the perfect opportunity for company leadership to reinforce company values and motivate employees.

At the year-end recognition event, include your employee award and make an award presentations. Award presentations have the ability to build company pride and motivate a large group of employees. To ensure the award presentations are meaningful, the presenter should be the highest-ranking manager who personally knows the award recipient and her accomplishments.

Before the award presentations at your recognition event, provide some simple presentation coaching. Download our Award Presentation Guide to help the presenter plan a memorable presentation. Remind presenters to keep comments positive, be specific and relate the employee’s accomplishments back to the organization as a whole. By recognizing outstanding employees at the year-end recognition event, you model desired behavior for the rest of the company.

Don’t forget to be sensitive to the recipients’ presentation wishes, too. After the initial presentation speech, allow the recipient to say a few words. You may also want to invite significant family members to participate depending on the award. Follow these tips and your year-end recognition event will be more than just a fun event… special awards presentations will make it a memorable moment your employees will treasure for years to come!

Year-end Employee Awards:

    - Perfect Attendance 
    - Top Salesperson 
    - Best Attitude 
    - Manager or Employee of the Year 
    - Department of the Year 
    - Volunteering Awards

Recognition Event Activity: Pop go the balloons

Encourage co-worker recognition with this fun activity!

Participants Required: 4-12
Time: 15 minutes
Supplies: Balloons in assorted colors; small note paper

Instructions:

1. Ask each person in your team to think of a positive action he has noticed over the last two weeks for two different co-workers. Write a recognition note to each of the two co-workers describing their behaviors.

2. Instruct each participant to select two balloons of the same color, roll up the notes and insert them into the balloons. Inflate and tie the balloons.

3. Toss the balloons into the center of the room. When everyone is finished, each person picks up a balloon of a different color than the ones they inflated. One by one, each person pops the balloon by sitting on it, then retrieves the note and reads it aloud. He then presents the note to the person about whom it was written.

4. Repeat until all balloons have been popped and notes read.

5. Proud owners are invited to post their notes inside or outside their work areas.


Shared Experience
This month’s shared experience comes from Miami, Florida. In planning for the organization’s year-end recognition event, our Floridian friend has a few helpful tools to make the process go smoothly.

“After a couple of years of event planning for my company, I developed my own employee event check list. It’s a simple sheet detailing all the different steps of the process, including theme brainstorming, venue selection and entertainment. The items are in the chronological order I’ve discovered from doing lots of events. So it starts with venue selection and brainstorming and ends with clean up and paying the bills. You can’t imagine how much easier this has made my planning!”

-Anonymous

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