Imagine this: your team has just spent months on a big release, and you just hit the button… it’s live! Over the next couple of days, you look at your metrics and people are using it. Hooray, this just keeps getting better and better!
So, what do you do?
If you’re anything like me, you celebrate quietly to yourself and keep working. Celebrating the team is something you know you should do—especially as a leader—but it’s not obvious how to do it well. We’ve all seen cheerful but halfhearted office celebrations in pop culture… under-inflated balloons tacked to the walls of a conference room, served with stale cake and a side of awkward conversation. We could set higher standards for ourselves, and meet them too! Imagine how that’d make your team feel: appreciated and recognized for their hard work. Your team wants that… don’t you?
So how do we get there? How do we celebrate the team’s accomplishments effectively? How do we tell our colleagues “thank you for the hard work” in a personally meaningful way?
In team celebrations at NoRedInk, we’ve found a couple big principles that help us celebrate effectively:
- Involve everyone!
- Celebrate both individual and team accomplishments.
- Give people something they will remember.
Everyone knows that story of being the last picked for some class sport—or worse, experienced it for themselves. Nobody likes feeling left out, so let’s make the opposite happen: involve everyone! One of my favorite ways to do this is through peer awards. Everyone gets someone else’s name, makes an award for them, and then everyone comes together to present them to each other. Awards can take any form; presenters might be inspired to say a few simple words of appreciation, write and perform a poem or parody song, utilize their amateur (or professional) photo editing skills to create a custom certificate, or even present a short set of slides. Whatever the award is, there’s always something to celebrate about each person on your team. We’ve seen people celebrate their peers for great feats of engineering, for being all around nice people, and on one notable occasion someone made a spoof Mad Max movie trailer for one of our product managers… he became “Reasonable Max.”
This is a chance for your team to let their creative side out—and even those folks who don’t see themselves as “creative” can recall a time or two in the project that they genuinely appreciated another person. As long as it’s done genuinely and in the spirit of celebration, the sky’s the limit! Celebrating this way as a team also has a compounding effect: it feels good to make others feel good.
In addition to recognizing individual accomplishments, don’t forget to celebrate the team’s accomplishments as a whole. For example, I really enjoy hearing how people are using and enjoying the things my team builds. It drives the point home that we’ve really accomplished something. At NoRedInk, where we’re making software to build writing skills, this means looking at feedback from students and teachers. What are teachers seeing in their classrooms? Do students rate themselves as having grown as writers because of using our tools? I’ve found it helpful to get together some reactions from students and teachers to show to the team. Whatever industry you’re working in, I bet you can find similar feedback. What are the important numbers in your business? Have you seen them go up? Even internal things can be helpful: how many pull requests did the team open? How many rounds of design? There’s all kinds of great stories in any launch. Share them with your team!
Finally, it’s helpful to give people something they will remember. When I was on Team Ink, Ashley (our product manager) sculpted little squids for everyone and glued air plants inside. Whenever I visit the office, I have to smile at how folks take such good care of their little squid plant. This can be as complex or as simple as you like—some teams like creating memories: going to have a picnic at a nearby park or to the team’s favorite restaurant. Other teams like to have something physical to keep around: patches or stickers to commemorate a big launch. Whatever you choose, don’t forget to include your remote folks—they’re as big a part of your team as the people in the office and should be celebrated too!
“Wow,” you might say, “that sounds like a lot of work. I’m not sure I have time for that!” I’ve felt that way too. Some parts of this can take time, so if you feel that way then consider starting off with a peer awards ceremony. It’s just a matter of blocking off 60 minutes on your team’s calendar, putting everyone’s emails in a gift exchange generator, and telling them what you’ll all be doing together! All told, it takes about half an hour of organization time. If a peer awards ceremony doesn’t sound like a good fit for your team, it’s time to brainstorm: write down as many ideas as you can in 10 minutes. Keep your hand moving, even if you’re just writing nonsense. What does your team like to do together? Board games? Having a special team lunch? Impromptu dance party? Surely you can come up with even better ideas. After all: you know your team best. The point is to just start. You can do it! It doesn’t have to be anything big or fancy, it just has to come from a place of appreciation.
Brian Hicks@BrianHicks Engineer at NoRedInk
(with special thanks to Ashley Chin for extensive editing help!)