International Youth Day: Celebrating workplace juniors
Established by the United Nations in 1999 and celebrated annually on August 12, International Youth Day (IYD) is a day on which the world recognises young peoples’ voices, actions and initiatives, as well as their meaningful, universal and equitable engagement.
IYD is also an opportunity for businesses to celebrate the efforts of their junior team members.
Here are 6 suggestions for celebrating IYD!
1. Send recognition to all junior team members
If there was ever a day to go all out with sending recognition to juniors, it’s IYD.
Use Perkbox Recognition to let your juniors know how much you and other senior members of your team value their ongoing efforts.
Make sure to spare no detail when highlighting their strengths and notable contributions! They may be junior, but they are still mighty.
2. Create a custom celebration tag for IYD
In Recognition, you can create your own ‘celebration’ tags. These are most commonly used for work anniversaries or life events, such as having a baby.
Add an ‘International Youth Day’ tag to specify which recognitions being sent on the day are for the event, and which are just regular achievements and messages of appreciation.
To see how to add a custom celebration tag, click here.
3. Use polls to include your entire team in the celebration
It’s important that everyone joins in celebrating your juniors’ hard work, and a great way to achieve this is through launching team or company-wide polls that highlight achievements, milestones and impressive progress.
Poll themes can focus on employee growth, cultural contributions, dedication, most improved, and anything else you can think of. Be as creative and broad as possible when choosing the poll questions so all your juniors can feature one way or another.
4. Launch new junior-focused initiatives with next year in mind
Whether it be a new mentor program, learning and development initiatives, networking opportunities or career growth plans, use IYD to take the first steps in getting new initiatives off the ground.
Map out where you’d like these initiatives to be by the next IYD so you can reflect on how well you’ve progressed this time next year.
5. Get senior leadership involved
Being recognised by senior leadership will always be encouraging for a junior team member. Have your senior leaders read through the recognitions sent on the day and select a few outstanding contributions to add a reward to.
Top performance should be judged based on contributions made across a range of categories, including areas like business activities (e.g. sales made), culture (e.g. participation in organising events), and teamwork.
6. Seek junior-specific feedback
Send out pulse surveys on IYD with the request for feedback on how well your organisation is looking after its juniors, what it’s doing right, and where there is room for improvement.
Make sure that everyone in your workforce gets the opportunity to share their suggestions, as investment into the way juniors are treated is in everyone’s best interest.
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