An NHS adviser has suggested staff wear “gratitude ponchos” to make them feel appreciated.

       Helen Bevan, a strategic adviser to NHS Horizons, a health service training unit, shared the image of a group of employees wearing paper bibs, with participants writing appreciative notes about each other on their colleagues’ ponchos.

       She wrote: “As a facilitator, I’m always looking out for activities to energise groups in workshops or teams’ away days.

       “Here’s one that’s new to me called ‘gratitude poncho’. It enables team members to find out what their colleagues most appreciate about them.”

       She added: “I think this would be most effective with a mature team where most people know each other.”

       Fostering positive thinking

       Prof Bevan, who is professor of practice for health and social care service improvement at Warwick Business School, took the photograph from a blog by Mehdi En-Naizi, an engineering company designer based in Belgium.

       In his blog, Mr En-Naizi describes how the “true essence of this activity is to bring teams together, foster positive thinking and appreciation for one another”.

       He adds: “It’s a powerful moment that sets the tone for your workshop session in a fantastic way.”

       He said that after staff have written on one another’s ponchos they should take two minutes to read and silently reflect on what their co-workers had written about them.

       “You’ll see genuine smiles, and sometimes even a tear or two,” he added.

       ‘Workplace humiliation’

       Tom Bennett, the Government’s school behaviour tsar who is known for satirising learning activities on the quirky side, posted: “Gratitude poncho just dropped!”

       Other social media users suggested that the ponchos “infantilised” users while others quipped that in the future anthropologists might study such a “peculiar 21st-century workplace humiliation”.

       Others asked whether the photograph depicted an office environment for adults or a junior school.