Group greeting cards are a great way to recognize employees for the different milestones in their lives, both personal and professional. Whether for welcomes, birthdays, work anniversaries, or just because, they’re an important part of workplace engagement.
When the whole team or office participates in online greeting cards, they build strong relationships at work. If an employee feels cared about and part of a team, they will be happier and have higher morale.
But, when the time comes to actually send a group greeting card, it can be tricky to get the entire team to sign the online group card. If you’re looking to improve participation, here are some of our top tips to get the whole office to sign group greeting cards.
Benefits of Sending Group Greeting Cards
Getting everyone engaged in signing a card is no easy feat, but it’s an important part of the success of your program.
Employee morale is the number one reason to encourage the whole office to sign group greeting cards. It is important to remember that employee satisfaction is not based solely on their day-to-day job. Many people seek to feel a strong bond with their teammates and they like to feel seen and appreciated at work. Receiving a full online group greeting card is a great way to help employees feel special. Seeing their team’s signatures will go a long way to improve morale in the workplace.
Group greeting cards are also a great team-building exercise. When used, they often prompt employees to share experiences and memories they have had with the recipient in their group ecard signature.
Admins can also encourage these interactions. If it is a farewell card, for example, encourage everyone to share what they have learned from the departing coworker. A birthday card would be a great opportunity to ask people to share their favorite attributes of the recipient. Help foster a wonderful workplace culture by sending group greeting cards and putting in the work to ensure they are signed by the whole team or office.
6 Tips to Get 100% Participation
1. Celebrate Often
The most important aspect of sending group greeting cards is to make sure you are sending them often. Make group greeting cards part of your work culture. When they feel like a part of everyday life at the office, it becomes second nature for employees to sign them.
In your workplace, make a point to celebrate the many valuable occasions in an employee’s life. Birthday cards, farewell cards, holiday cards, and work anniversary cards are just a few examples of unlimited online cards that could be sent. Create a culture of celebration at your office and watch the participation soar.
2. Be Consistent
You must stay consistent when sending online group greeting cards. If you celebrate one employee’s birthday, you must be sure to celebrate every employee’s birthday. Employees are less likely to sign them if they are never the recipient.
Determine what occasions you will send ecards for at your company and then stay consistent in sending them for those specific events. You may want to work with leadership or customer success to find the right occasions for your culture and create a plan.
Once you’ve decided, you can use an automation feature to schedule these events in advance. This tool can automatically create boards for popular events from templates, makes batch-inviting contributors easy, and allows for scheduling delivery ahead of time.
3. Respond to Participation
Building a culture of acknowledgement will also improve visibility for contributors and encourage participation. After they sign a group greeting card, take a moment to respond to each employee. This could be a quick Slack message, a casual “thanks,” or a shoutout in a meeting, but acknowledge their participation and thank them for doing so.
This will help each employee know that their contribution matters and that management sees they care about the team. While you may not need to do this for every board that’s created, doing so at the start of a program will encourage team members to build habits of participation.
4. Rotate Responsibility
Employees are more likely to participate in signing an online card if they occasionally have the responsibility of gathering signatures. Make sure that each employee is asked to take leadership in creating online group greeting cards for their co-workers.
This will help create an understanding of the importance of quickly responding and encourage them to sign right away. When ownership of boards is shared between team members, it encourages all to take pride and responsibility in workplace recognition.
Don’t Go Overboard
It may seem contradictory to celebrating often, but try to limit how many signatures you request for a group ecard. You don’t want to create a situation where employees are receiving so many requests for signatures that they get lost in endless emails.
Celebrate specific occasions, but there is no need to send a group greeting card for EVERY occasion. Be discerning and create more impact with the occasions you choose to celebrate.
6. Make it Fun
Sometimes group ecards can feel cold and impersonal if they just have a bunch of signatures on them. Try coming up with a theme or idea to give employees when you ask for their signatures on a group greeting card. Ask people to share a funny story, favorite memory, tribute, pictures, gifs, videos, etc.
To create unique cards, Kudoboard allows you to add media with the click of a button. You can also embed a YouTube video in your post, so let your imagination run wild and try creating a video from the office instead of traditional signatures. Let the creativity flow and this will help encourage greater participation from the office.
More participation, more positivity
Group greeting cards are an amazing way to encourage team building and foster stronger in-office relationships. They go a long way to helping employees feel appreciation and like a part of a team.
However, they can backfire if you don’t get the whole team, or a least a majority of the office, to participate in signing the online card. You never want to send someone a group greeting card with just a couple of signatures. This could have a negative effect and make a person feel bad or isolated.
Encourage people to participate by celebrating often, being consistent, responding to participation, spreading the responsibility around, and making it fun. Put in the effort to get high participation in signing group greeting cards, and it will really help boost morale around the office.
Ready to get the whole office involved?
Build strong relationships and increase connections with group greeting cards for any (and every) occasion