293 | Unlocking Your Team's Potential: The Transformative Power of Gratitude

As we head into summer—a season when team energy can dip and distractions rise—it’s more important than ever to ensure your people feel seen, valued, and appreciated. In this week’s episode, Jenni Catron breaks down why employee appreciation isn’t just a feel-good bonus—it’s a strategic leadership move that strengthens organizational culture, boosts motivation, and builds trust.

Why this conversation matters now:
According to Gallup, employees who feel recognized are 4x more likely to be engaged. Yet 65% of workers say they haven’t received any form of recognition in the last year (Workhuman & Gallup, 2023). That’s a gap leaders can’t afford to ignore—especially as we enter a season where burnout and disengagement can quietly take hold.

Jenni unpacks:
✅ Why appreciation must become a cultural norm, not a calendar event
✅ No-cost strategies to increase motivation and belonging
✅ Creative ideas like “post-it parties” and gratitude rituals that leaders can start today
✅ How simple gestures—like handwritten notes—can shift the tone of your entire team

Whether you lead five or fifty, this episode will equip you with practical, meaningful ways to build a culture of gratitude—one action at a time.

🎧 Take a listen. Then forward it to a fellow leader who needs the reminder too.

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Transcript

Hey, leaders, welcome to the Lead Culture podcast. We're a part of the Art of Leadership Network. I'm your host, Jenny Catron, CEO of the 4Sight Group. We're a company dedicated to helping leaders develop thriving teams. Each week, I'll be your guide as we explore practical strategies to equip you with the tools you need to lead with clarity, confidence, and build on

stoppable momentum in your organization. My mission is to be your trusted coach, empowering you to master the art of self-leadership so you'll learn to lead yourself well so you can lead others better. Each week we take a deep dive on a leadership or a culture topic. You'll hear stories from amazing guests and leaders like you who are committed to leading well.

So let's dive in and keep learning on this leadership journey together. Well, friends, today I want to talk about today is the importance of employee appreciation truly being a part of your culture rather than just a one-day event. I'm also going to give you some suggestions for some things that you can do to make appreciation ongoing in your culture. Because here's the thing, the best leaders nurture team cultures that include rhythms for regular employee appreciation.

Jenni Catron (02:34.125)
And employee appreciation can be as simple as an intentional thank you and as meaningful as a celebration of an important milestone, right? So employee appreciation doesn't have to be complicated and grandiose. Like there are occasions where you really need to honor and celebrate somebody. Like there's a big milestone that we need to make sure we are acknowledging. And then there are also just the day-to-day interactions that we want to show appreciation for. We want to be people of

who express gratitude that are grateful for what our team is doing to help us achieve our mission together. And so we've compiled a list of some of our favorite ways to celebrate employees. Our team at Foresight did some brainstorming this past week to say, hey, what are some of our favorite ways to celebrate employees? And we want you to use these ideas to spark more ideas for creating a culture where employee appreciation is a common part of your culture.

rather than a once a year event. And so in this episode, this is going to be a rather short episode, but I'm going to give you just a few ideas, some easy to implement ideas, some ongoing ideas, some no cost ideas. And then I'm going to give you a way to download a resource from us where we put a ton of ideas all in one place to just help spark that creativity for you. Because here's the thing, I know that you want to honor and celebrate your employees, right?

Very rarely do I run into a leader who has no appreciation or thankfulness for their team, right? They're probably not staying in leadership very long if that's their attitude. So I know that you really do want to express appreciation. You probably appreciate your employees far more than you tell them. And so what I want to do is I want to spark some ways that you can make sure that appreciation that you have actually comes out and your team members feel it.

So let's look at first some easy to implement ideas. Because if you're like me, all of a sudden these kinds of things sneak up on you and you're like, man, I've got to figure this out. What can I do? All right, here's a couple of easy to implement ideas. First, I want you to write an unexpected note with specific words of how that team member is contributing to the team or helping achieve the mission. So.

Jenni Catron (04:56.355)
If you've got a smaller team, this is potentially more viable or you can do this just for your direct reports. But write a note with specific words. And that's an important piece of appreciation is that it's specific. Like you're not, hey, thanks so much. I appreciate what you do. You could write that to anyone, any number of people, and it would apply. I want you to write a specific note that says that thanks them for how they're contributing to the team. Okay, so there's one idea.

Another fun idea is to give a gift card to your employee, but give it for like their whole family. So if they're married, maybe it's for them and their spouse to go on a date night. Maybe it's a family outing or, you know, if they're not married, maybe it's, you know, a place that a restaurant, you know, they love and you give them a gift card that's big enough for them to take a friend and you say, Hey, take a friend with you and go have a great night out. Right. So a gift card to some, place that you know, that they really appreciate that's fitting for that.

Another easy to implement idea is just to make sure that your conversations include a specific thank you. Now, this would be particularly fun on this Friday for Employee Appreciation Day, that if at every meeting you started with a thank you. Thank you for taking care of this. I know that it's in good hands. Thank you for scheduling this meeting and getting us all together to have this conversation. Thank you for taking care of that customer and the complaint that they had.

thank you for making sure all of our volunteers were there this past week and implementing this new initiative or whatever it might be. But how fun would it be that if every meeting that you had on Friday, every conversation you had with a team member, this can kind of be a fun game for you, right? Every meeting you started with a thank you, right? And a specific thank you. And just like created that just attitude of appreciation for the day, okay?

Those are some easy to implement ideas. Let's talk about some ongoing ideas, some things that if you really want to make appreciation a part of your culture, here's some things that you could go you can do in an ongoing capacity. So at your weekly staff meeting, get in the habit of doing shout outs to people that maybe have exhibited a value, one of your core values, or maybe that they've accomplished something that you want to honor or thank them for.

Jenni Catron (07:20.493)
but get in the habit of just doing shout out celebrations of your team. Most of you, your teams are small enough that this is realistic or doable, or if you do it by department, that would work too. But at your weekly staff meeting, just start it out by shouting out and celebrating different people on your team. It becomes contagious. It's super fun. Another fun ongoing idea is to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, to make these days a big deal. I don't know about you, but

There's a lot of things that my family wasn't great at, but one of the things my family was phenomenal at was celebrating birthdays. Like, I don't know why that was such a big thing in our family, but it was. And when it was your birthday, we were going to do something fun. You were going to get a cake and you were going to be celebrated. And I just kind of grew up then with that expectation that you could celebrate it on your birthday.

And so this can be a really fun thing to do inside your culture is make sure that you celebrate birthdays and like anniversaries, years on staff and make them a big deal. Like get that person whose birthday or anniversary it is, get them their favorite snack or their drink or their, you know, cater in lunch from their favorite place. Give, do lots of words of affirmation. You know, you can put them on the hot seat and let all the rest of the staff kind of affirm what they love about them. Find the way that works in your culture.

But make sure you are celebrating birthdays and anniversaries because it's really an acknowledgement of that individual, that their uniqueness and their contribution just for who they are, not even what they did. You know, because a lot of times employee appreciation is tied to something job specific that they did. And so by celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, you're just celebrating who they are and that they're a part of the team. And I think that's really valuable. Now, let me give you a word of caution on this one, because this is one that

I unintentionally got wrong because we were in a season, this was a number of years ago, we were in a season of really fast growth and we did not do a good job of keeping up with birthdays and anniversaries. And so we would typically celebrate birthdays by the month. Okay, it's March, know, we're going to celebrate these birthdays, you know, and we'd call them out. And for a season, somebody would say, and it's my birthday this month. And it was like,

Jenni Catron (09:42.015)
immediately the wind went out of the moment, right? Because it was like, gosh, we missed that person. And then they either acknowledged it or somebody acknowledged them for them, but then they feel awkward because we missed it. So I really strongly encourage you to do birthday and anniversary celebrations. And I even more strongly encourage you to make sure you've got good data so that when you celebrate people, you have the right information and you're able to celebrate them well. So birthdays and anniversaries.

Another fun idea for employee appreciation and another one that's not tied to performance is to have like a game lunch where, you know, maybe once a month or once a quarter, you do lunch on site and you play games over lunch. And it's just a time for connection and to have fun. Right. So it's a way to appreciate your employees by just getting us together, letting us talk, share, have fun together. But again, it's not

related to outcomes. It's just about being together. That's a really fun way to just express employee appreciation. And then another thing that I would encourage you is just looking at your employee life cycle from the time somebody joins the team to the time they leave the team. What are some things that you can do to acknowledge and celebrate them at different milestones in their time at your organization? And just thinking through that when they come on board, do they get a gift basket or

you know, some kind of acknowledgement of how grateful we are that a swag bag, right? That's one of the things we do at the Foresight team. So when you join the Foresight team, you get a bunch of the Foresight swag and we like create swag we actually like. So that's one of the things you get when you join the team. And then, you know, throughout their journey, birthdays, anniversaries, you know, different milestones, celebrating those different points in an employee's journey. And then even when they leave, how do we...

How do we finish with them? Do we do words of affirmation? Do we do a fun day with them? What do we do to employees that are leaving? Like how do we honor and celebrate them as they depart? And then lastly, let me give you a couple ideas for some no cost employee appreciation ideas. Because some of the things I've talked about so far might require a few resources. You might have to think differently depending on the size of your team about what you can do. But here are some no cost ideas and these are big.

Jenni Catron (12:04.271)
because I think a lot of times we will delay employee appreciation efforts because we've got to get the budget for it. Well, you don't have to get the budget for it. You have to make a point of being purposeful about doing it. So here are a couple of no cost ideas. First one, throw a post-it party. So at the end of a project, invite other team members that were impacted by that project to write a quick thank you note on a post-it.

and then put it up all over that person's workspace. So let's say somebody takes the lead on a big project and the project gets completed, have the rest of the team write some thank you notes. And again, the more specific, the better, write some specific thank you notes and put it all over the workspace. It's such a fun, visible way to see the appreciation of your team. Another no cost idea is at the end of the work week, this is for you specifically as a leader, at the end of the work week,

Schedule time before you shut down and close out for the week to write three thank you notes to team members. This, you guys, I think is one of the most powerful things you can do as a leader is to write actual thank you notes. Hopefully you are expressing appreciation to your team members as you go about the week. But when we take time to actually physically write a note, it just means something. It hits a little differently. I bet you feel that way if you've ever gotten a written thank you note.

And so this is one of those practices that I wish I was better at and more consistent because I've watched other leaders do this really well and I really admire it. So they just carve out a little time to write three thank you notes. Like if you did three thank you notes once a week, that's over 150 thank you notes that you would write in a year. That's huge. Do you know the impact that your words could have on somebody else? And again, the more specific you are, the more meaningful it is.

But that just simple habit could have such profound impact on your team and their sense of appreciation. And then last thing, last no cost idea. At a staff meeting, make space for each staff member to write down three thank yous. Things that they need to say to someone in the room. So this is similar, but it's now empowering the rest of the staff to actually write some thank yous. So what you might do is have everybody in staff meeting put a

Jenni Catron (14:28.371)
know, stacks of post-it notes all over and say, hey, write three thank yous to someone in the room and then give them, and this is fun to actually go around and share those thank yous out loud. You could just opt to share the thank you notes with each other, but I think it's sometimes fun to say it out loud to the other person. So you can, you can do some variations on that theme, but creating the culture of appreciation where

everybody's contributing, like it's something we do, it's just part of who we are, becomes really powerful. All right, I hope I sparked some ideas for you. Doesn't have to be over the top, you guys. It just needs to be intentional. Where your team members go, gosh, they really do see me, they really do care, they really do appreciate the work that I do.

That's so huge in helping our employees feel a sense of connection and a sense of belonging in our work. So I mentioned to you, we have a resource we created with a bunch more ideas for how you can create a culture of employee appreciation. So if you will email us at podcast at getforsight.com, it's podcast at get the number four S I G H T.com and just put employee in the subject line.

We'll send you that resource. Also, in addition to those different ideas, like the things you can do immediately, the ongoing ideas, the no cost ideas, we also have just a resource list of some different resources talking about employee appreciation. So again, email us at podcast at getforsight.com and we put employee in the subject line or in the body of the email, wherever you put it, we'll find it and we'll send you that resource. Thank your team. Appreciate them.

Acknowledge the good, meaningful work that they do and why it matters. Be specific and show your appreciation this week. It's so important. And if you enjoyed the episode, if it was helpful to you in some way, let us know. Reach out to us on Instagram and Facebook at Get4Sight or on LinkedIn at the 4Sight group. We would love to hear from you. I'm at Jenny Catron on all the socials as well. So drop into my DMs. Let me know that you listen to this episode.

Jenni Catron (16:51.543)
I'd love to hear from you. And then please share this with another leader. Maybe you need to share it around the team, you know, because to prep all your leaders for employee appreciation day. And then if you haven't done it yet, would you go leave that five star review? Give us some specific feedback. Let us know if you appreciate what we're doing here at Foresight and specifically on the Lead Culture podcast. I would so appreciate it. All right, friends, thank you for listening today.

Keep leading well this week and we'll see you next time.