Thank-you message to employees: what the leader says at the year-end party

At some point during the year-end party, someone will hand the microphone to the leader. Conversations stop, the music lowers, and for a few minutes the whole team looks at the same person. In that room are the people who made the year happen with you, month after month. The thank-you message you deliver there will be compared, sentence by sentence, with the year they lived. When was the last time someone repeated something you said after the party?

Thank-you message at the company year-end party: what searches show

In the Google Trends data gathered by Mentoniano in October 2026, two searches related to company year-end parties suddenly grew in the 2025 season: "frases confraternização empresa" (company party phrases) and "mensagem de agradecimento confraternização empresa" (company party thank-you message). Among queries about year-end messages, another rising search was "mensagem de agradecimento final de ano" (year-end thank-you message). The data show relative interest, without indicating how many people searched.

As we read it, these searches reveal a habit: many leaders look for the words of their thanks a few days before the party, in a list of ready-made phrases. The same list is open on the phones of other leaders, at other companies, in the same week. No phrase on that list knows your team.

The boss's thanks changes what the team does

An experiment by Adam Grant, of the University of Pennsylvania, shows the weight of thanks coming from the person in charge. The study, coauthored with Francesca Gino and published in 2010 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, followed fundraisers at an American university who received a fixed salary. A boss stopped by the room and publicly thanked one of the groups, in two warm sentences, according to the summary by Professor Robert Sutton, of Stanford. The following week, the thanked group made about 50% more calls. The other group kept its average.

The explanation the authors found matters to anyone about to step on stage. The increase came from the feeling of being valued by other people. As we read it, thanks works when the team feels that someone saw what it did, and that depends on the content of the sentence.

Year-end thank-you message with small facts and names

Research on recognition at work points to detail. In a study released in 2023, Gallup and Workhuman compared employees with great and with poor recognition experiences. In the first group, 72% said small achievements are usually recognized at their company. In the second, 16%. Those who have great recognition experiences are 20 times more likely to be engaged than those who have poor experiences, according to the two companies.

The following report, from 2024, has a figure that says a lot about companies' habits: only 11% of employees say someone at work has ever asked how they like to be recognized. The same document states that specific feedback is more meaningful than generic praise. The data are from the United States, and Workhuman sells a recognition platform, so the numbers are best read as an indication.

In Brazil, the Robert Half survey with The School of Life heard from 774 college-educated professionals aged 25 or older between January and February 2025, half of them leaders and half team members. Among team members, the main factor for happiness at work was an organizational climate with positive relationships, cited by 75.29%. Only 34.48% of team members said important information is always communicated clearly, completely and at the right time. The leader's speech at the year-end party is one of the few occasions in the year when they speak to everyone at once, and it can bring that clarity about the year that has passed.

Phrases for the company year-end party: how to write your own

Here at Mentoniano, when we write a leader's speech for the year-end party, we start by listening: what they saw, what made them proud, what was hard. The leader's speech for the year-end party and for the convention is one of the scripts Léo Bento, our founder and scriptwriter, writes based on a conversation with you. This material becomes a short speech that fits in a few minutes and follows a simple path:

• Open with a scene from the year that everyone in the room lived, with the month and place.
• Name people and what they did, including the small achievements almost nobody saw.
• Acknowledge frankly what was hard, the way the team already knows you acknowledge it in hallway conversations.
• Say why you are thanking them, in a sentence only your company could hear.
• End with a short sentence about the year ahead, easy to remember the next day.

In a thank-you speech, the leader can tell a difficult moment of the year in order: the problem, what each department did, who stood out and how the story ended. The names mentioned need to be real, checked with the teams and approved by the people who will be recognized on stage. In the 20th-anniversary film for the law firm Medina Guimarães Advogados, which Mentoniano wrote with REC Mart, the team appears in one short line: "Aqui, tem gente que está há mais de dez anos. E tem gente que saiu... e quis voltar." (Here, there are people who have been with us for more than ten years. And there are people who left... and wanted to come back.)

That question applies to the party stage. When the executive says a team member's name out loud and tells what that person did, the whole room tends to turn toward them, and the thanks reaches the person who needed to hear it. If you want to understand what happens when an audience notices a generic text, our series on AI-written speeches brings together research and cases.

Thank-you message and year-end video: the stage and the big screen

If the party has a video and a speech, it is worth planning both together. The third article in this series showed how to script the company year in review, and the ending of the video can be the cue for the first sentence of the speech. When the leader starts with the scene the team has just seen on the big screen, the speech gains the weight of the images.

Rehearse the speech out loud, preferably for someone outside the leadership team, and check that every name is right. A wrong name on stage undoes the recognition you wanted to give. If your company is also sending messages outside, the second article in the series covers the year-end message for clients, with the same logic of facts and names.

In the next article, the last in the series, the Christmas video for companies: script, timelines and working with the production company.