Celebrate Your Organizational Successes
(Editor’s Note: Today’s article is brought to you by our friends at Kronos, a leading provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions. Kronos was recently recognized as North America Company of the Year for their innovative Workforce Dimensions solution. Many congrats to them. Enjoy the article!)
I know the holiday season is behind us, but I couldn’t resist sharing this Time Well Spent from our friends at Kronos. It’s a great reminder that organizations need to celebrate their successes. Even for the activities that we do annually – like filing taxes, counting inventory, or open enrollment.
I also want to add that it’s equally important for managers and HR departments to celebrate too. We regularly talk about how necessary it is to recognize employees for a job well done. The same applies to HR and management. We’re often so busy taking care of employees that we forget about ourselves.
In addition to employee celebrations, create opportunities for management teams and HR teams to celebrate. I’ve worked for organizations that hosted a quarterly manager outing and occasionally a happy hour. I’ve also worked places where we shut down HR for a two-hour lunch. Employees were totally cool with it. In fact, I believe employees liked seeing that the company practices recognition at every level. It made everyone feel good about the work they were doing.
Make celebrations fair and appropriate. What I mean by this is don’t have one set of standards for how employees should celebrate and another for management. It will not set the right tone. In addition, keep the celebration proportional to the accomplishment. For example, accomplishing a relatively small goal might warrant a pizza party but a fancy dinner at an expensive restaurant could be too much. But it should still be celebrated!
Celebrate responsibly. I have absolutely nothing against celebrating with adult beverages. And in the media, we hear about companies breaking open a bottle of champagne to celebrate getting a big contract. But there’s a time and a place for celebrating. Anyone who indulges needs to be responsible. In addition, the company needs to make sure that, if they are allowing celebrations at work they do not turn into inappropriate situations. If you have questions, reach out to your friendly neighborhood labor attorney about the risks.
The point is to give employees, managers, and the company’s HR department a way to enjoy their successes. It allows everyone in the organization to see that the company is accomplishing their goals (even if they weren’t directly involved in them). It shows everyone in the company that when you do good work, the team gets to celebrate.
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