Celebrating success as a team
It’s essential, particularly when you are working at pace, to pause and celebrate the wins. If you don’t celebrate the wins there is a very good chance that you will eventually lose sight of why you’re working so hard in the first place.
This week at Which? we gave everyone in Product & Tech an award that they could personalise with images of their shared successes that also represented one of our company values — “We make it happen”. Our ever-talented Design team created stickers, (or trophies as we like to call them), that will be used to decorate the award and highlight our current and future successes.
One example of this was the initial launch of our new mobile app — yes yes, I know, we should focus on outcomes not the outputs, but sometimes it’s good to celebrate the big milestones even if they haven’t directly driven value just yet… so long as we don’t take our eyes off the more meaningful goal they’re designed to achieve.
What’s important when celebrating success is that it’s done in an inclusive way that acknowledges everyone’s contribution. Drinking down the pub after work on a Thursday night usually isn’t a sufficient celebration if a team has just over delivered on its target to drive a recurring incremental increase in monthly active users. Ensure you’re considering the people that need to get home to care for children or elderly relatives; what about people that don’t drink or find busy crowded spaces uncomfortable? That’s not to say never go to the pub, far from it, but success needs to feel good to everyone that was involved.
After two years of remote working, restricted movement and over digitalisation I also particularly like that we’ve made these awards physical. Having something that you can hold in your hands, even something simple like our freestanding glass plinth, something to show to your families and keep on the desk or mantlepiece as a constant reminder, feels more relevant than ever as we all seek to find our feet in a new hybrid world.
Final thought: I’m also a big advocate of having genuine company values. So this is a really nice way to further ingrain those values into everything the team does. I love that one of Which?’s values is “We make it happen”. In an organisation that’s built on rigour, pace and taking risks doesn’t always come naturally — so celebrating the teams that take on this challenge and really deliver is of great importance.
Celebrating on a budget: While this isn’t a hugely expensive way to celebrate success, sometimes budgets just don’t always allow for glass awards and fancy stickers. I’ve had almost as much success working with teams to create Trophy boards, both physical and on a shared slide or collaboration board.
Acknowledgement: I first saw this approach to awards implemented while working at the BBC. I don’t believe the BBC originated this idea but they implemented it well and gave many members of the team a real sense of pride and achievement. Thank you for the inspiration.
All thoughts are my own.
