March 27, 2020: Celebrating Team Wins While WFH
Good morning,
Today we get back to the core WFH topic of this newsletter. If you have other parts of WFH that you’d like me to cover, please drop me a note in the comments or by email!
On to the update.
Celebrating Team Wins While WFH
Even in-person, teams tend to celebrate haphazardly at best. I frequently hear friends and colleagues complain that successful projects seem to go unrecognized and instead simply generate more work, leaving them with even less time. No wonder people burn out.
When remote, celebrations are even harder because the positive energy doesn’t transfer as well over videoconference (and really doesn’t transfer at all over text).
So, what makes a good celebration? The best celebrations:
Recognize work that has been done and progress that has been made
Catch people doing things right
Are genuine
Are ritualized in the culture
Are specific to what individuals have done, rather than generalized
Give individuals a moment to bask in the spotlight (other team members see that the person is being celebrated)
Aren’t “work” in and of themselves
Avoid negativity (which has a place, but it is not during celebrations)
Not every celebration needs to have each of these parts, but if any are actively violated, the impact of the celebration is vastly diminished and can even backfire.
Now let’s consider some common celebrations against these conditions:
The Congrats Email
This is where a team leader writes up a big email announcing a launch and congratulating everyone on the hard work done. It’s not uncommon to have a dozen names listed, grouped by job function (“engineering”, “marketing”, “product”, etc…). Team members typically chime in with reply-all, all saying generic variants of the same thing.
The Congrats Email is certainly ritualized, doesn’t create work for any of the individuals listed, avoids negativity, and recognizes work done and progress made.
However, it’s certainly not catching people doing things right, it can come off as obligatory rather than genuine, it’s super generalized, and at best it creates a small ray of spotlight for team members to crowd around and bask in jointly.
In summary, it’s better than nothing, but we must do better.
Cash Bonuses
Everyone likes money, right? Yes, but, money only solves some needs. We could go through the entire list of conditions, but let’s jump right to the most relevant: basking in the spotlight. The problem with money is that nobody tells anyone else that they got money, and so there’s zero chance to bask in the spotlight.
A Trip To Hawaii
Yes, some companies celebrate wins by sending their team to Hawaii. Sounds like the good life, right? Wrong. This violates key conditions, including:
It’s super general, not speaking to any specific contributions for each individual.
It’s “work” for many team members (for example, people with families are now being asked to leave their family, or pull their kids out of school for a week).
“Forced” Gratitude
Many companies have a “kudos” system for praising other employees. It’s really hard to bolt these on to a culture, and these systems are often dramatic under-used or feel forced. I probably don’t even need to tell you how this violates the “is genuine” condition.
So what can a WFH individual do?
There are plenty of solutions that only leadership has permission to implement. There are also plenty of solutions that require being in the office. Here, we’re going to focus on things that any individual can do, even when they’re WFH. Consider giving one of these a try this week (Fridays are great days to celebrate).
Thank people one-on-one for things you catch them doing right. Try having a goal of getting to 5 of these every morning. Bonus points for catching things people are doing when they think nobody is watching.
Recognize micro-milestones on team slack/email, even if the team leader doesn’t.
Find the celebration in a failure. For example, celebrate learnings when an experiment fails, or celebrate the end of an especially painful project.
Ship people gifts (like food) as thank-yous or to celebrate events like birthdays and work anniversaries.
For the skeptics
There are a number of counter-arguments to celebrations, and they’re rooted in some truth. Here are some of the ones I’ve experienced:
People are just doing their work, we shouldn’t glorify it
Yes, sometimes it can feel like we celebrate things that should just be table stakes. The question to ask is: What’s the harm in celebrating these things? I see two potential pitfalls:
If we’re taking so much time to celebrate, then we won’t get any work done.
People won’t do better work if they are congratulated for simple things
For #1, if the team spends just 1% of their time celebrating, that seems pretty minimal, right? For a team that feels like they celebrate too much, add up the time. My experience is that it’s far less than 1% of the total time. 1% of a 40-hour workweek is 24 minutes.
For #2, there’s a body of research that indicates that positive feedback generates better future results than negative feedback. Start with this book to learn more.
We are making people feel bad if they get the short end of the celebrations stick
Yes, it absolutely sucks to not receive any validation when everyone around you is. This is not a problem with celebrations in general! This is a problem with too little celebrating. Everyone does some things that are worth celebrating.
Have fun creating your own celebrations, don’t just be limited to my suggestions. And thank you for helping recognize work well done!
That’s all for today. If you are sick or someone you know is sick, I wish you the best, speediest recovery. If you’re not sick, please continue to self-isolate, and otherwise have a great weekend!
See you on Monday!
Andrew