Celebrating work victories is an essential part of remembering why you do the work you do, and staying motivated. Team celebrations help remind everyone that each team member has something important to contribute, and just how much that work is appreciated.
Of course, not every little victory can be celebrated in equal measure. If you get in the habit of celebrating every single little success, the celebrations stop feeling special or meaningful and start feeling obligatory.
It’s also easy to fall into a pattern of only celebrating the achievements that are easiest to recognize from an outside perspective. For example, it’s easy to heap praise on the sales team for meeting targets, but what about their assistants? What about the coders or engineers who designed the product or service?
With that in mind, here are a few different types of workplace victories that are worth celebrating as a team.
1. Meeting monthly or quarterly goals
A celebration for hitting a daily or weekly mark might start to feel excessive, but if your team exceeds targets or delivers before a deadline in any given month, that’s worth recognizing. The recognition could be as simple as getting the first round of drinks at the Friday happy hour, or ordering pizza for lunch.
2. New ideas
Whenever a team member has a new idea about how to cut costs, streamline a process, improve a service, or anything else, they should be celebrated. Make sure everyone on the team knows where the good idea came from and give that person their moment to shine. Team-wide recognition can be as simple as a nice email that everyone can respond to with their own individual congratulations – it never hurts to individually recognize good ideas with a raise or a promotion!
3. Positive feedback
If the team you manage gets great feedback from a customer or from another team within your company, that’s worth sharing and taking a moment to celebrate. Any awards should be proudly displayed in a common space, and any written feedback should be shared internally so everyone has a chance to see it.
4. Making it through a tough time
Sometimes a project or series of projects is simply overwhelming, and the thing to celebrate isn’t so much meeting goals, but simply making it through. After a long stretch of late nights, take a minute to celebrate when the hard work is over. Acknowledge just how hard everyone worked to achieve their goals and thank them for going above and beyond. That sort of gratitude can go a long way toward rejuvenating spirits.
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