May 6, 2025
The “right” employee appreciation gift isn’t just about the budget. It should reflect the specific achievement being recognized—whether it’s years of service, performance, or another milestone—and take into account the individual preferences and circumstances of the employee.
For instance, custom awards are great for celebrating unique achievements and service milestones, while curated gift baskets are ideal for showing appreciation during the holidays.
But appreciation isn’t just about gifts. It’s about making employees feel valued, included, and heard. Gifts contribute to this, but they’re most effective when part of a broader employee engagement strategy. You’ll know you’re on track when employees are more engaged, eNPS scores improve, and when retention rates rise.
That’s why many growing businesses are moving beyond one-off gift giving and investing in tailored, year-round recognition programs. These programs align with company goals, promote values, encourage performance, and develop a shared purpose among teams.
In this guide, we explore:
Terryberry’s rewards and recognition platform is used by over 40,000 companies globally. Recognize people’s wins and contributions, automate the gifting process, and boost employee engagement with Terryberry. Choose from several reward categories and get custom awards manufactured.
6 Types of Employee Appreciation Gifts for Every Need
Whether you’re acknowledging someone’s contributions, rewarding performance, or celebrating years of service, here are some employee appreciation gift ideas to consider.
1. Personalized Gifts
Personalized gifts show that you’ve put thought into the gesture. They’re tailored to the recipient’s interests or the occasion, making them feel more sincere. These gifts are ideal for expressing genuine appreciation.
Personalized options can range from engraved notepads and pens to custom drinkware, like stainless steel water bottles (or even a “world’s best boss” mug), personalized blankets, keychains, custom swag, and branded corporate apparel (such as hoodies, t-shirts, tote bags, etc.).
2. Custom Awards (for Service)
Many of our customers use custom awards to recognize years of service or as incentives to drive employee engagement. On average, companies experience a 12% increase in employee engagement when they use custom, tangible awards as incentives.
At Terryberry, we’ve been proudly manufacturing heritage awards since 1918, including custom jewelry, trophies, plaques, and luxury items. Customers choose these awards to recognize employees’ contributions and to drive specific business goals forward.
For example, Amteck, a family-owned construction company, uses our rings to recognize employees who uphold the company’s core values. Recipients can choose from traditional designs, modern styles, and a pendant option.
3. Bulk and Budget-Friendly Gifts
If you want to show appreciation to a team, department, or your entire workforce, there are plenty of budget-friendly options available in the $15–25 range per person. These include home-baked goods, desk plate signs, foot hammocks, candy, snacks, and drinks.
Working with a smaller budget doesn’t mean you have to forego personalization. You can still gift engraved notebooks, mugs with personalized messages, or offer themed foods.
4. Themed Gifts (for Holidays or Anniversaries)
Holidays and company anniversaries offer a great opportunity to appreciate people’s year-long contributions to your organization’s success, boosting morale and cultivating a sense of belonging.
Consider themed mugs, custom apparel, curated holiday gift baskets filled with gourmet foods and seasonal treats, or more unique options like cheese gift sets. Themed gifts don’t have to be limited to holidays or anniversaries, either. Some of our customers create themed employee engagement programs and use custom gifts to support them.
5. Travel and Experience Gifts
Employee appreciation gifts don’t always need to be physical items. Consider offering experiences like gift cards for a nice dinner, movie tickets, hotel vouchers, store gift cards, or even air miles.
A major advantage of these gifts is their flexibility—employees can redeem them whenever it’s most convenient for them.
6. Wellness and Self-Care Gifts
Skincare products, gym memberships, and yoga mats are just a few examples of gifts that show employees you value their wellbeing. Here are some more corporate wellness gift ideas to support your employees in different ways:
- Fitness trackers: Help employees track steps, sleep patterns, and even run an EKG on their heart.
- Standing desks: Help team members break free from the sedentary lifestyle! Standing desks are especially thoughtful for remote employees.
- Deep tissue massager: Help someone unwind after a hard day’s work!
- A spa day: Support someone’s physical and mental health by gifting them a day at a wellness retreat.
Note: You can offer all these wellness gifts, along with various other items, travel experiences, and days out via the Terryberry rewards platform.
Check out some of our other guides to browse more gift ideas:
- 30 Employee Gift Ideas to Show Your Appreciation
- Top 14 Team Thank You Gifts for Employee Appreciation
- 20+ Staff Appreciation Gifts Your Employees Actually Want
- Top Employee Appreciation Lunch Ideas Your Team Will Love
But if you’re looking to set up an employee appreciation program that delivers measurable business success, keep reading.
Give People the Right Gifts on the Right Occasions
If your company is small and doesn’t gift employees often, an informal gifting program may suffice. Maybe you’re selecting gifts for the employee of the month program and a few themed items during the holidays.
But as your organization grows, a more formalized program with the right processes and infrastructure becomes necessary. Here’s why:
- The admin work piles up: Picking gifts, tracking nominations, managing dates, shipping, and cost tracking becomes increasingly complex. Spreadsheets no longer cut it, and inefficiencies can negatively affect employee experiences. Gifts may be delayed, or some people might get overlooked.
- Your needs typically evolve: What started as an end-of-year or post-team win gifting initiative may eventually grow into a broader employee appreciation program. As companies expand, HR leaders often want to invest more in boosting culture and performance. This transition moves programs from simple gifting to full-fledged recognition systems, requiring larger budgets and a business case to demonstrate impact.
The good news? The admin work is easy to automate with a rewards and recognition platform like Terryberry. The right platform not only streamlines employee gifting but also helps drive employee engagement and prove your program’s business impact—more on that in the next section.
For now, let’s explore how Terryberry simplifies and elevates the employee gifting experience.
Here’s how it works:
1. The Points System: Let People Choose Their Preferred Rewards
While managers or leadership may choose gifts for employees on special occasions (like service awards), a points-based system works well for recognizing smaller milestones and daily achievements.
You can configure Terryberry’s recognition platform to allow both managers and peers to award points to each other for specific reasons—whether it's recognizing a colleague for demonstrating one of the company’s core values or celebrating a personal milestone, like becoming a parent.
Employees can accumulate their points and redeem them for rewards directly on the Terryberry platform. You can customize your company’s reward catalogue, selecting from categories like merchandise, company swag, luxury, lifestyle, travel, and more.
Note: Thanks to Terryberry’s integration with Amazon Business, employees get access to the largest selection of rewards available, giving them complete freedom of choice.
2. Make Gifting Experiences Effortless & Personalized
When it comes to employee appreciation, the experience of receiving the gift matters just as much as the gift itself. Packaging, customization, and delivery all play a role in making it feel meaningful.
At Terryberry, we make employee gifting easy and impactful with:
- Beautiful packaging and reliable delivery
- Easy order tracking and simple returns
- Best-in-class customer service
- Full-service administration
For service awards, we provide custom kits tailored to each recipient—complete with a premium gift box and a heartfelt appreciation message.
Once an order is placed, the process is seamless for the recipient. They get automated shipping updates and can contact customer support if needed. And with 100+ fulfillment partners, remote and global teams never have to worry about delays or international shipping costs.
3. Never Miss a Milestone or Important Occasion
Managing nominations in spreadsheets, tracking important dates in calendars, manually selecting gifts, and ensuring achievements aren’t overlooked becomes increasingly tedious as your company grows.
Terryberry’s rewards platform automates the administrative tasks involved in employee appreciation, making the process painless for HR, managers, and employees alike.
With Terryberry, you can:
- Manage nominations and approvals: Allow peers to nominate each other for awards, making it easy for managers to recognize team members.
- Automatically celebrate milestones and awards: Configure Terryberry’s platform to align with your company’s recognition programs—such as employee of the month or years of service. Set up automated reminders, nomination processes, and approval workflows. Custom awards can also be ordered directly from the Terryberry platform.
Driving Employee Engagement with Incentives
Using employee appreciation gifts as incentives in employee engagement programs can help achieve specific business outcomes, such as improving retention and increasing morale.
This approach shifts the conversation from requesting leadership approval for a gifting budget “because it’s a nice gesture” to demonstrating how that budget can be leveraged to drive company goals forward.
We’ve helped customers design tailored rewards, recognition, and wellness programs that instill company values, boost sales performance, reduce burnout, and more. The key is to align programs with your company’s objectives, using appreciation gifts to recognize and incentivize employees’ contributions.
Here’s how two of our clients used custom awards to reinforce core values and boost engagement through leadership and peer recognition programs:
1. How Amteck’s Leadership Instills Core Values with a Custom Awards Program
Amteck is a family-owned construction company that boasts exceptional retention rates in an industry known for high turnover. The organization has always emphasized the value of its people and worked hard to cultivate a culture around the company’s core values.
But as the company grew its workforce across 13 states, maintaining a strong, value-driven culture became more challenging. Amteck sought to reinforce core values and improve morale with custom awards by partnering with Terryberry.
With Terryberry’s help, Amteck revitalized its legacy ring program from the 1990s. The revamped program now recognizes employees for upholding the company’s core values with custom rings. Employees can choose from traditional designs, modern styles, or a pendant option. Those with legacy rings can update them with new stones to reflect additional years of service.
To make people feel appreciated and connected, executives and senior leaders personally distribute the rings, creating impactful one-on-one interactions. These recognition moments are captured with videos and photos, shared in the company's internal newsletter.
Within three months of launching the new ring program, nearly 7 out of 10 employees could correctly articulate Amteck’s core values, up from only 1 out of 10.
2. How Chelsea Groton Bank Cultivates Core Values with the Acorn Rewards Program
While programs like Amteck’s rely on leadership-driven recognition, Chelsea Groton Bank took a different approach: empowering employees to recognize each other’s everyday contributions. Paired with custom awards, peer recognition becomes a powerful tool for shaping culture.
As the largest mutual bank in Eastern Connecticut, Chelsea Groton Bank operates across 15 locations with over 200 employees. When they partnered with Terryberry, they already had a milestone award program in place—but wanted to go further by celebrating daily wins and promoting the company’s seven core values: being innovative, collaborative, trustworthy, professional, knowledgeable, versatile, and positive.
Their idea? A gamified recognition program called “Acorn Rewards.” Through this peer-to-peer recognition platform, employees can give each other “Purple Acorn Awards” when they observe a colleague upholding one of the bank’s core values or making a meaningful contribution.
Terryberry brought the vision to life, configuring the platform to roll out Acorn Rewards across all 15 branches.
The bank chose a themed plush toy—the “Happy Squirrel”—as an appreciation gift for employees who collect 10 Purple Acorns. Employees earn additional points for every 10 Purple Acorns they receive, which can be exchanged for luxury and lifestyle awards.
Chelsea Groton wanted to measure the program's impact, to ensure employees were motivated to participate. Terryberry’s Recognition Analytics revealed that participation in the Acorn Rewards program is more than double the industry average for financial organizations.
Rachel Evrett, Chelsea Groton’s HR specialist, thanked Terryberry for configuring our recognition platform to their needs:
“Having the team from Terryberry behind the scenes has really helped our program succeed. Alex, Donna and Arvid have always been very helpful in providing anything that we ever need, whether it’s reports or research or modifications to the site. That’s another reason for the level of success that we’ve seen.”
Building a Business Case for Appreciation Gifts & Engagement Programs
Like Chelsea Groton Bank or Amteck, you may have a concept in mind for driving employee engagement with gifts and incentives. But to convince leadership of your program’s value, you’ll need to show its impact through deep analytics and measurable results.
For instance, if you launch a leadership recognition program like Amteck’s, you might want to demonstrate its effect on detractor rates.
Proving impact requires two sets of analytics. The first comes from the program itself—mainly participation stats. The second comes from employee listening data, such as eNPS and Likert scores.
If you’re using the Terryberry employee engagement platform, here are the insights you’ll gain:
1. Employee Listening Data
Unlike other employee listening tools that require building surveys from scratch, Terryberry offers pre-made surveys designed by Ph.D. researchers and backed by I/O psychologists. Our baseline survey measures employee engagement across six key culture categories: belonging, leadership, equity, purpose, empowerment, and well-being.
We call these engagement indicators.
Our research shows these six indicators reliably forecast employee engagement. For example, trust in company leadership is linked to retention, and employees who feel a strong sense of equity are more motivated.
With Terryberry, you can run surveys that measure eNPS, these six engagement indicators, and Likert scores. Combining these insights with participation stats from your engagement programs helps demonstrate how those programs are driving company goals.
Further reading: Employee Satisfaction Survey: Templates, Questions & Tools
2. Participation Stats
Once your employee engagement program is live on Terryberry, the platform tracks who’s participating and their level of involvement.
For instance, if you’re running a recognition program, our recognition analytics reveal program participants, quartiles for giving and receiving employee recognition, and which managers are actively engaged in giving recognition.
When you combine these stats with employee listening data, you can measure the impact of your engagement program in several ways:
- Impact of manager recognition on retention: Compare eNPS scores between teams led by highly participatory managers and those with leaders who don't engage in employee recognition.
- Impact of peer recognition on engagement indicators: If you launch a program that encourages peer-to-peer recognition and nominations for gifts, you can measure how this affects employees’ sense of purpose and belonging. Does showing appreciation increase employees' sense of purpose? Does it help them feel more included in the culture? And are certain groups or specific departments feeling less included?
Granular insights like these allow you to demonstrate your program’s impact and identify gaps that need to be addressed.
For example, if you have managers who aren’t participating in recognition, and your employee listening data shows that their teams have lower eNPS, you can present this data to leadership to prove how appreciation directly impacts retention and morale.
Bring Gifts, Employee Engagement & Culture Together with Terryberry
While occasional employee appreciation gifts are a nice gesture, dedicated systems that automate gifting and boost employee engagement deliver stronger results. Making gifting part of your broader employee engagement strategy helps drive key business goals—like retention, performance, and morale—while showcasing the value of employee appreciation to leadership.
Terryberry’s highly configurable employee engagement program lets you build tailored rewards and recognition programs, automate manual work, create custom rewards catalogs, and track the impact on employee engagement and retention.
Schedule a demo today to start building recognition and incentive programs that truly move the needle.
