Why Awards are a celebration for all, not just the winners.

Putting our work on show

I started thinking about showcasing achievements soon after a Siemens initiative to show our commitment to society across our Russian regions. We’d decided to launch a country-wide school competition. The competition saw pupils given a future-gazing challenge, tied in closely with Siemens’ strategic priorities. The winners were offered a scholarship to help them afford going to University, while others were offered the opportunity to join the company as a trainee during their studies.

Running the project was not only rewarding for me personally, but we got amazing feedback from the pupils, their parents, schools, the media and even government bodies across entire country for it. It was such a success that our PR Agency suggested we put the initiative forward for a European Excellence Award. For Siemens in Russia, it was the first time we’d done anything like it. We had to fill in long, detailed forms, share proofs from the project and source testimonials. Everything had to be done in between our various other projects and business priorities. We worked closely with our agency to pull everything we needed together — and then, fingers crossed, we applied.

I didn’t actually start out with very high expectations for the entry, not with it being our first. We wanted to share our achievement, but I hadn’t really considered that we’d get shortlisted. Imagine my surprise when we did indeed make the list of finalists and found ourselves invited to the awards ceremony!

A chance to network during a time to shine

I was so thrilled to attend what was a very glamorous and well organized event, representing Siemens among the range of multinational and mid-size companies in attendance. There were so many amazing and innovative communication projects on show and it was a great chance to meet and network with a number of my wonderful peers from the industry, exchanging with them the inspiration for our ideas and the things we’d learnt in bringing them to fruition. Ultimately, we came second in our category. Yes, there was a tiny bit of me that was disappointed not to win, but it was overpowered significantly with the joy and gratitude I felt to have our work featured on such a prominent stage. Somehow celebrating our success by entering awards had fallen by the wayside and was never a top priority in our very busy schedules, but we need to remember to take the time to celebrate our triumphs — and seeing your work showcased in a public forum is really a high you can’t beat. Since then, we’ve entered many more industry awards, often becoming a finalist and, on several occasions, winning awards for our various communication and marketing campaigns.

Collaboration is key

When I moved across into HR a few years ago, the company decided to focus on driving transformation, making the team both more agile, but also a fundamental core for the business. There was a big focus on HR becoming a shining function, one that would unite colleagues, run knowledge-sharing initiatives to showcase their different projects and show HR as a professional, core and agile organization.

I, personally, wanted to foster a greater spirit of collaboration. That meant finding new ways to praise our staff, appreciate their hard work and recognize the team effort that goes in to everything they do day-to-day. That might not necessarily be talking about successes; it could just as easily be running through the things we’ve tried and have failed — and why they’ve failed.

Unearthing unknown skills in our own company

This led to us launching our own Global HR Award in 2017. I was in awe at the sheer number of amazing projects submitted. They shed light on so many achievements, skills and competencies we had in the organisation that we hadn’t really considered before. The Global HR Award gave us an opportunity to really see what was going on within our own organization.

Only a handful of company cultures support promotion of work or shouting out when they have great results, often with different departments working in silos when they could really learn from one another. Not only did the awards flag some excellent know-how from across the regions, but we were also able to see where people had identified similar challenges or issues on the path to completing their various projects.

As a HR team, we were given an insight into the different ways we could bring together and shape global virtual teams around certain knowledge areas, people who could collaborate on similar topics and then share them as best practice with the rest of the world.

Why Awards can make everyone feel important

That was all from just receiving and reading through the award entries. My real emotional moment? It was when we came to running the rehearsal for the awards ceremony. Upon announcing the winners of one of the awards and having their whole team ascend to the stage, I felt an overwhelming amount of pride for how amazing each and every one of my colleagues are — and how special it was to be able to run internal awards to celebrate their achievements! The awards involved a some preparations and logistics; slide presentations, email discussions, catch-up calls, etc. But the moment everyone was there together, happy and eager to find out who the winners were, it all became worth it. That’s when it hit home how important this project and the ceremony were — not just for finalists, but for all of who applied.

In my opinion, that’s why company awards are so important. There’s no other internal communications campaign or initiative that can bring so much added value to an individual, a team or, ultimately, company success.