Unlocking Employee Motivation: The Power of Appreciation, Recognition, and Celebration in the Workplace
Appreciation, recognition, and celebration are three of the most powerful and effective ways to keep your employees motivated, engaged, and proud of their impact.
Yet they’re often overlooked, underused, and even free tools that are left sitting on the table. Technically, these concepts could fall under the engagement and retention category. However, appreciation, recognition, and celebration are so significant in the effect that they can create that they’re worthy of their own section. Steven Covey, author of the best-selling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, states, “Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival, to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.”41
Picture this:
Your team sets lofty goals for the year, and one by one, team members are accomplishing them like no one’s business. Big wins are happening left and right. As the leader of that team, you do an internal happy dance in salsa mode, and you feel like everything is falling into place. But you’re moving so quickly that “celebrating” is simply setting the next goal. So you take a step back to reflect. You look around at your larger team and realize that no one is celebrating with you. You wonder, “Does anyone notice? Does anyone care? Does this even matter?”
Can you relate? This was my story just a few years ago. I was swimming in wins—but I was also drowning in a work addiction. I never took the time to stop, reflect, and intentionally celebrate the accomplishments that I earned through dedication and tenacity. The people around me couldn’t have cared less that I was accomplishing my goals; it was just business as usual.
When we don’t take the time to honor our accomplishments, it’s almost as if they didn’t matter in the first place.
Because we are leaders in the workplace, it’s our responsibility to celebrate the successes of those around us.
An Inc. magazine article noted that “celebrating our accomplishments is critical to our success.” The author made three big points to support this argument, which I’ve summarized here:
- The act of celebrating changes your physiology and strengthens your psychology. When you celebrate, endorphins are released inside your body and you feel incredible. When you accomplish something and don’t take the time to celebrate, you are robbing yourself of an important feeling that reinforces your success.
- Celebrating strengthens your relationships. Your own celebration is contagious, and those around you want to share in your success. As accomplishments are properly recounted, new ideas and opportunities are formed and shared.
- Your celebrations attract more success. Success begets more success, so it’s only natural to build on existing momentum, especially during events of celebration.42
Knowing these facts, I did an informal poll among my network on LinkedIn. I asked, “How do you celebrate when you accomplish a goal?” I received about one hundred responses. Not surprisingly, the majority of folks celebrated with food and drink. But right next to that, people said they set another goal. In my mind, this means that they’re rewarding themselves with more work—not celebrating what was accomplished. Am I wrong?
We simply don’t celebrate enough.
So next time you or someone on your team has a big or a little win, take a moment to recognize the accomplishment and celebrate. Here are a few ways you can do that in alignment with your values:
Give a toast. If every meal or celebration started with a toast to something positive, the world would be a happier place.
Taking just a few minutes to raise a glass (with or without alcohol in it) creates good vibes and feelings of shared connection through celebration. If you’re hosting a gathering where food is involved, how about you weave in a toast next time?
Try something like, “I want to give a toast to our administrative team. You all have been carrying the weight of this recognition program for the past nine months, and our entire company is better off because of your efforts. I learned that we have so much good happening here that we never would have heard about if it weren’t for this process. We must keep this positive momentum going to continue to know, own, and live our values. Cheers to the administrative team for designing and seeing this program through. You are the epitome of what it means for us to recognize how we are and can continue to live our values more deeply.”
Show gratitude. Being appreciated goes a long way in igniting positive feelings about and associations with work.
And just like giving affirming feedback, giving specific gratitude also goes a long way. Instead of “Thanks for your help today!” you could take it a step further to “Thanks for your help today! It made such a difference to have your perspective and buy-in during this process. We really appreciate you and how intentional you are about living our value of innovation.”
A national gratitude survey conducted by Janice Kaplan showed that “grateful people earn about 7 percent more than their ungrateful colleagues. They also experience lower stress, are more resilient and physically fit, have 12 percent lower blood pressure, and simply feel better.”43
You might even want to consider a team huddle at the start and end of each day during which everyone shares one thing they’re grateful for. When we’re in the energy of gratitude, more possibility opens up for us. So why not support your team in starting and ending their time with you on a positive note?
Create a physical expression of celebration. Doing happy dances, ringing a bell, or even playing upbeat music to ignite physical movement is an awesome way to express celebration.
It was commonplace in finance for there to be a bell in the sales team’s office, and whenever someone made a big sale, they would go over to the bell, ring it, and get high fives from their team members to celebrate that moment.
When I worked at a grassroots nonprofit, we’d celebrate the small wins of our students by turning on Miley Cyrus’s song “Party in the USA,” singing at the top of our lungs, and dancing it out together. Again, one of these may resonate with you more than the others—you must be authentic with your own style and figure out what makes sense for you and for your team.
Encourage people to recognize one another. As related earlier, it’s important to create opportunities for people to recognize others who activate your company’s core values and shout them out for their efforts.
I’ve also worked with companies that use stationery that’s been created specifically to drop off at someone’s desk or put in the mail and has a template for the value they want to recognize someone for, what that person did, and how it impacted them.
One company even created a whole I-Spy campaign in which team members and clients could use an online portal to nominate people for living their values. Then at the end of each month, the nominations were collected and one was randomly selected for a prize while everyone got the opportunity to share the good vibes by hearing what folks had submitted.
Give awards. Value awards are pretty darn cool!
They can be as complex as having a nomination process with folks reviewing nominees against a standardized rubric for selection. Or if you don’t have that capacity, they could be done as a random drawing, as I outlined in the previous I-Spy example. Do what you have the capacity to do most equitably and thoughtfully.
The awards could come monthly, quarterly, or annually, an update from the more traditional Employee of the Month type of award. You can choose to add some sort of incentive or not. I’ve found that prime-location parking spots, gift cards, extra time off, or even company apparel go a long way in helping people feel celebrated. Recognizing that not everyone likes the same things, allow your team members to choose whenever possible.
Honor progress and failure. If you want to ramp up your psychological safety and innovation, start to celebrate failures and see what happens.
One of the people I coach came from a company that would throw failure parties, with cakes and everything. The idea was to normalize that everyone fails and that we need to embrace that failure in order to do better in the future. Make note of your progress and celebrate the new wisdom you have for next time.
Say thank you, and mean it. Saying thank you can do double duty as a way to celebrate and recognize someone.
Don’t be stingy with your appreciation; it costs you nothing to tell someone that you’re grateful for their efforts. But be sure that it’s not shallow. We want to thank people with depth and quality around why we appreciate them so that they understand what behaviors we’d love to keep experiencing with them.
Recognize important dates. Think first day on the job, birthdays, work anniversaries.
When you can remember these dates and make even a tiny effort to recognize them, it can be remarkably rewarding for the person on the receiving end. This can be an annual calendar reminder that you set up so that you can drop a quick email, make a call, or perhaps even take a team member out to lunch to recognize and honor their milestone.
Share accomplishments internally and externally. People get excited for you when good things are happening.
And it’s not just your team that can benefit from a good vibe boost around sharing those wins. When you take the time to intentionally shout out your accomplishments, with grace, humility, and love, others feel happy too. Next time you send out a newsletter or post on social media, might there be something you could intentionally praise about your team’s accomplishments that would ignite that possibility in others? It’s worth trying to find out.
Incorporate impromptu team huddles. You know when sports teams get in a huddle, put their hands in the center, and then leave with a “One…two…three…go, team”?
Well, that stuff works! It may seem silly to take a practice out of athletes’ playbooks, but it’s worth trying. Before any big experience my team puts on, we gather in a huddle (whether remote or in person), each share our intentions for the experience, and then honor them by ringing an energy chime (a simple bell that emits an extended calming sound) and just breathing into those intentions together. It’s not quite the sports approach, but it’s another example of how you can make a concept like a team huddle reflect your own values.
Give permission to be human. Remember that one size does not fit all when it comes to how people like to celebrate or feel appreciated.
For some people, making a big staff announcement about how much you appreciate them would be a great joy, and for others that could feel embarrassing. Check in and find out how people like to be recognized and then respect what’s right for them. Something that might be the highlight of your life might feel like a punishment to someone else.
Appreciation, recognition, and celebration go a very long way in connecting us to our purposes and making us feel good in life. Gary Chapman explains in The Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, “When relationships are not nurtured by a sense of appreciation, the results are predictable:
– Team members will experience a lack of connectedness with others and with the mission of the organization.
– Workers will tend to become discouraged, feeling there is always more to do and no one appreciates what I’m doing.’
– Often employees will begin to complain about their work, their colleagues, and their supervisor.
– Eventually, team members start to think seriously about leaving the organization and they begin to search for other employment.”44
With these crucial factors in mind, what will be your first step toward igniting more intentional appreciation, recognition, and celebration in your culture on an ongoing basis?
How can you shift these things from being special occasions to being a part of your everyday norms? What might be possible in your business if every day people felt the power of connection and belonging through appreciation, recognition, and celebration?
Consider all the ins and outs of your workplace culture; where might you be able to be more impactful with linking your core values to daily interactions? Have you considered your decision making processes, meeting dynamics, engagement and retention? Are you digging deeper, or are you just grabbing for the easiest, fastest box-checking practices?
The more you reflect on where your values are at present and how they can be further infused into the workplace, the more successful you and your team will be in connecting them with your conscious and subconscious thinking, planning, and leadership approaches. And the more your team makes those connections, the more everyone has the opportunity to grow in alignment with their greatest potential—instead of being stuck in how it’s always been done before. The more you reflect, the more you connect, the more you grow! Cheers to that opportunity and the possibility that lives inside it when you choose the path of your values.
Are you looking to increase employee engagement in your organization by learning to appreciate, recognize, and celebrate your team?
This was an excerpt from MaryBeth’s book – Permission to Be Human: The Conscious Leaders Guide to Creating a Values-Driven Culture.
Learn more from this company culture book.
