Yes. Celebrate.
High fives. Atta girls. Good job milkshakes. 4 o’clock happy hours.
It can be anything. What matters is that you celebrate. Celebrate the great work your folks do every day. Tell them often. It’s so simple but we don’t do it. Instead we take our terrific employees for granted. Not always, of course. When we do take time to think about it, we find ourselves being grateful for the incredible work everyone does. The problem is we’re busy. It’s hard to find that moment to sit back and just be grateful. And even when we do, we forget to mention it to the employees we’re feeling grateful for. Then we’re singing a Joni Mitchell ballad…
“….You Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)…”
But forget about turnover. Just think about production.
Here are four reasons you should be celebrating more with your team.
- People enjoy work more when they feel good about what they do. This includes the value that’s placed on them and the quality of their work. I’m not saying you can’t overdo this, but rarely do leaders over-compliment their team. Try doing it more often.
- Your employees are just people. They get down. They have personal stuff going on. Being told that they did a good job on something could change their whole day and give them the bit of encouragement they need to push through some of the more doll-drum tasks they deal with every day.
- When you do the same thing every day – sit in the same office, under the same fluorescent lights, breathing the same not-so-fresh air – sometimes motivation is hard to come by. As a leader, you’re likely someone your team respects – which means you have immense opportunities to be the pick-me-up on a teammate’s bad day.
- The Progress Principal. This research by Theresa Amabile and Steven Kramer focuses on the idea that in order to feel good, to feel motivated, people must feel that they’re making progress, not only at work but also in their personal lives. The pair’s best advice for managers is to celebrate small successes with your team. Kramer writes:
“By supporting people and their daily progress in meaningful work, managers improve not only the inner work lives of their employees but also the organization’s long-term performance, which enhances inner work life even more. Of course, there is a dark side—the possibility of negative feedback loops. If managers fail to support progress and the people trying to make it, inner work life suffers and so does performance; and degraded performance further undermines inner work life.”
I started thinking about why we should celebrate more at work when I stumbled upon this article from Eric Barker about how we don’t celebrate enough in general. Eric discovered that if we start celebrating the small things in addition to the big ones, we see major improvements in every area of our lives. Specifically, in our relationships, at work, and in our levels of happiness and motivation.
And if that’s not reason enough for you to start celebrating more at work and at home, consider this:
“Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This “peak-end” rule of Kahneman’s is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves how the experience felt.”
Our brains are unbelievably sophisticated, but they aren’t perfect computers. We don’t actually remember the full experience of something. We’re more likely to remember how we felt at the end of it. This means we have opportunities all the time to take control of our feelings about a certain event. When we get to the end of happy times, or, more importantly, tough times, we should celebrate. If we do that, according to Kahneman, “it would be hard not to feel like you have an amazing life.”
And isn’t that what we want for our team? Isn’t that how we want them to feel about their life’s work?
As leaders, we have control of that because we set the standard. We create the vibe in our office. Take the time to celebrate. To have fun. As far as work goes, the effect is kind of ironic.
Spend more time not working and more work will get done.
What do you think about celebrations at work? Do you have any tips or suggestions for other leaders? Have you noticed a positive impact in your teams mood or relationships with each other after celebrations? How often are you saying “good job”?
