As we enter the holiday season, and celebrate Thanksgiving this week with friends and family, we wanted to take the time to give out our warmhearted thanks. It’s the season of gratitude, after all.
Thank you to our wonderful clients, for letting us support your most crucial meetings, and largest events, and for opening your hearts and minds to the idea of thinking and working visually.
Thank you to our incredibly talented team, for bringing big ideas to life, for going the extra mile for clients, and for continually making our business better, year over year.
And, last but not least, thank you to our blog readers and avid ImageThink fans for taking the time to read and interact with us here and across our social media platforms. It brightens all of our days to see your comments and hear your experiences working with our team.
We’re wrapping up another great year at ImageThink, and we couldn’t be more grateful to you all. We hope each and every one of you has an especially happy Thanksgiving surrounded by loved ones and of course, lots and lots of mashed potatoes.
But let’s not stop there. In the spirit of giving, here are some tried and true ways to express gratitude to your team or celebrate organizational or employee successes.
1. “Thank You.”
While it may sound silly, or perhaps too simple, more often than not the most powerful way to express gratitude is to say, “Thank you.” According to research, it really isn’t that farfetched – studies suggest that thanking others can improve well-being and physical health, and can strengthen social relationships, produce positive emotional states, and help us cope with stressful times in our lives.
All in all, people like to feel appreciated, whether for their work efforts or even for something small. So, tell someone “Thank you,” but be specific. Just like with feedback, giving concrete examples of what you appreciated helps make your words more meaningful and sincere.
2. Something Worth Sharing
If an employee, co-worker, or team member has done something exceptional, share it loud and share it proud. Compassionate dealings with customers, projects well executed, and targets reached are all deserving of a pat on the back, and not just from the team, but from the entire company.
A workplace application or channel (like Teams or Slack) is great for connecting with multiple departments and helps gets eyes on client feedback and team or personal wins. It also provides the opportunity for others to celebrate a job well done with a quick congratulations or thumbs up chat.
Utilizing social media platforms to amplify team member or company efforts is another great way to maximize reach, and it signifies to your audience that you value your team, employees, or company.
3. A Game of Gratitude
At ImageThink, we often like to show our thanks to one another in our company-wide meetings. It’s always nice to see team efforts come together successfully, and to gracefully thank one another for individual contributions. Sometimes, however, we like to express gratitude by stretching our creative minds with an activity or game.
Don’t have a game? Do what we did and make one up! ImageThink created this collage of images to represent Team Member Awards. In this activity, each member of the team selected an object to award someone by connecting the object to their personality and strengths. Not only does something like this shake up traditional ways of expressing gratitude, but it’s also a great way to learn you’re a spatula.
Feel free to steal this image for yourself to show gratitude to your team in your next meeting.
4. A Handcrafted, Personalized Visual Bio
When you want to go the extra mile to thank a team for a successful campaign or project, celebrate an employee anniversary, or honor senior leadership, there’s no better way to do so than with an ImageThink visual biography.
An ImageThink visual bio is a unique, one-of-a-kind portrait decorated to include notable attributes, successes, and more. ImageThink visual strategists create everything from fully illustrated visual bios, to photographic bios with illustrated elements.
5. A Custom Organizational History
Perhaps you’re looking to celebrate company culture or a particular partnership or relationship. A custom organizational history is an excellent way to reflect on how far you’ve come as an organization, or to project where you want to go in the future. Past successes, client stories, and the history of the people and the business can all be used and leveraged in a distinct visual to induce company-wide gratitude.
With your company or partnership brought to life with personalized, illustrative elements created by ImageThink visual strategists, individuals grow unified and feel a part of something bigger than themselves. It also makes others feel appreciative of the work that has been done and see the personal impact their work has had.
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading, and hope you revisit these ideas when the time comes to express gratitude in your organization or business. And, if you want to do so in a picture-perfect way, you know who to call.
Happy Thanksgiving!
