If they stop and think for a minute, most people can think of a few colleges who’ve helped them out in the last 24 hours… and are grateful. Unless they’re in a work culture where sharing this appreciation is a habit, chances are the person who helped them will never know about it.
It’s no secret that feeling genuinely appreciated lifts people up. At the most basic level, it makes us feel safe, energized, and valued. So it follows that we should encourage the people in our organisations to share their appreciation of each other on the regular.
Appreciation is recognising someone’s value, regardless of the output of their work. This is about appreciating who they are.
When we’re together in an office, it’s common to show appreciation via non-verbal, subtle cues. We might give someone a smile and a nod which basically says “thanks so much – I appreciate you”. These kinds of signals can’t happen in remote organisations, so as with many things we need to be much more explicit when sharing appreciation.
Shoutouts in Slack 📣
One of the core channels I recommend every Slack has is a #shoutouts channel (see 
By sharing these in a public channel, rather than by DM, we help spread a little bit of positivity and love with everyone else too!
When you’re first getting started with this, send a reminder out once a day asking people to spend 2 minutes reflecting and sharing some appreciation in the channel.
#shoutouts channel on SlackAppreciation Week 💘
If you want a fun way to encourage appreciation consider a regular appreciation week (maybe the week of 14 November?), where the whole organisation is encouraged to reflect and show gratitude to each other. This might involve:
- Running workshops specifically focussed on gratitude or appreciation.
- Including gratitude/appreciation exercises in all meetings.
- Encouraging daily reflection on this topic.
- Sharing amusing (but genuine) “valentines” cards, gifs etc with colleagues.
What else to celebrate?
We should obviously show appreciation when someone’s done something great, or has really helped us out. But we should also shout out major events like…
- Birthdays.
- Work anniversaries.
- Promotions.
- Significant work achievements or project completions.
- Weddings & partnerships
- Births, adoptions or other family events.
- Etc.
Summary
Showing appreciation at work, and encouraging others to do the same, is really easy. But is too easily forgotten when things get busy. As leaders, we should be showing appreciation for those around us, but also establishing simple systems which encourage everyone to do the same.
Spread the love ❤️