When you’ve passed a milestone in your business, hit a big target or completed an important project it’s important to celebrate success. It’s not simply letting off steam after a busy period. If you plan correctly and understand the value of recognising hard work done well, you can weaponise a celebration to empower your employees and take your business to the next level.
When employees know you recognise and acknowledge their work, their motivation skyrockets. If they see the effort they put in disappear into a black hole of corporate indifference there’s no incentive for them to work harder, innovate and provide more value.
For smaller projects, a sincere thanks is a good reward in itself: acknowledgement that the work has been seen and appreciated. For bigger projects, a bigger celebration is due!
Organising a companywide event has a lot of advantages. If people are rewarded even if their team hasn’t directly contributed to the success it helps everyone see they are working a caring, supportive company, who they want to succeed. It also fosters interdepartmental cooperation: the synergy of different teams working together can produce unexpected and extraordinary results so it’s well worth fostering a friendly atmosphere where teams know they are working together not competing.
You can use companies like Venuescanner to find a good venue for your event quickly, so organising it needn’t eat into your time or budget, and it’s well worth it. While recognising the success of a team specifically with a lunch or rewards for that team make them feel valued individually, it silos everyone’s expertise off, and makes people compete for the next reward. If success for a team leads to rewards across the board, everyone gets to see the fruits of that success and feel valued even as you take the chance to reward a particular team’s contribution.
If one department sees rewards others cannot access, it lead to stagnation in other teams. People lose the will to work harder, to innovate, to find new solutions for you. It’s easy to reward a sales team because it’s easy to quantify the extra money they bring into your business. HR performs an equally vital role, but doesn’t have the chance to bring in a big contract so can never earn the same rewards.
Rather than setting HR against Sales, allowing them to share the success when a big contract comes in, keeps everyone in your company happy and working together for mutual success!