Great employee experiences occur when you recognize and celebrate huge successes
What do you do after your team has spent months doing due diligence, working long hours, enhancing systems, compiling financial data, and running reports so that investors will not only fork gazillions of dollars of cash over to your organization to continue doing great work, but also set you up for a long successful future?
You celebrate!
Recently I had the opportunity to speak to a large Assisted Living organization after they just came through the period I described above. Now having taken the accounting/CPA path early in life I know what those months of work looked like. I know the long hours. I know the frustrations; the heated moments. I know the meetings; the sweating it out as you wait for responses.
Apparently so did the CEO.
The work culminated in March. The transaction closed on a Monday. Three days later the CEO shut down HQ for a couple of hours and held a RECESSitation – a period of learning, recharging and celebrating. We, okay I, poked fun at the craziness of workplaces and showed them some things about their teammates/coworkers they didn’t know. The CEO said a few words about the future and thanked them over cocktails and appetizers. It was a totally feel good event.
But here are the things that I found remarkable:
- The CEO recognized the hard work, the personal sacrifices that were made during this period, and the importance of doing something for his team
- The CEO understood the importance of celebrating immediately; not months later when people would have forgotten how hard they worked as they plowed through the next project.
- The CEO made it mandatory for everyone to come out and have a good time.
The UCONN men won the NCAA championship the other night. On Tuesday they arrived home to CT. Within a couple of hours of their return there was a pep rally and celebration at the school. 5,000 people showed up. Imagine if they had held that pep rally in two weeks? My gut is 5,000 people would not have shown up.
Are you celebrating your successes? Are you waiting for the right moment. The right moment is immediately after the success.
