Never forget how far a packet of crisps and some bickies can go

There’s a lot going on at my work at the moment. In fact, there’s a lot on all the time, but just right now it feels magnified.

I work in a digital team for a retail brand. It’s a fast paced industry and everyone is under a lot of pressure a lot of the time.

At the moment we are up against a few big campaign deadlines. All hands on deck type stuff. At the same time, we have to keep the business as usual ticking over too.

Of late this has meant a lot of late evenings, a few weekend to do lists, and a general drop in the “gusto” of the office environment. Swings and roundabouts, as the say.

Today we had our monthly trade reporting. This calls on a fair bit of work (and far too many excel sheets for my liking). While it’s always good to see how the activity we’ve run has stacked up, it’s a fairly stressful few days pulling it all together. And more noticeably than in the past, it felt like the energy across the teams was down.

A couple of the other managers I work with picked up on this vibe too. So we decided we’d bring some treats to the meeting. A few quid for some crisps and biscuits. Nothing fancy, just a little sugar hit. And I can’t emphasise how well this went down.

For such a token gesture which cost next to nothing, the team was chuffed. Especially because it’s not something we really do all that often.

What I took away from this was not that empty calories are the answer to stress in a corporate environment. But more the importance of taking pause from time to time and remembering to say ‘thanks’. Generally speaking, the managers on my team are really good at this. But it’s one of those things that’s so simple it is easy to forget.

Sometimes we get so bogged down with what we are doing day to day that we forget to give a nod to extra effort others are putting in. The fact is, we are never the only ones under the pump.

Affirmation and thanks are important. They boost morale and give purpose to the hard yards. And while taking the time to verbally communicate this with team members is one of the best ways to do this. A quick trip to Sainsbury’s goes a surprisingly long way too.