Celebrating Success – A Key Activity for Engement and Wellbeing

Celebrating Success

Celebrating success in the workplace is a key part of creating a good place with a good workplace culture. Doing so boosts employee engagement, job satisfaction and performance, improves wellbeing and relationships within the team and improves retention and attraction rates. Positive knock-on effects include things like improved customer and client feedback as well as improved product development and problem solving.

It’s not only giant successes thatbenefit from being celebrated. Small step goals are just as helpful to celebrate as larger goals. It can also even be helpful to encourage the celebration of personal as well as work goals, as doing so helps team members get to know each other and build stronger relationships. It’s also worth considering not just “what” goals (so achievements and things you have done), but also “how” goals (behaviours that you’re proud of). Celebrating behaviours can be a great way to link positive responses of organizational behaviours.

Hints & Tips for Celebrating Well

Personalize It

Everyone is different, and we all appreciate different forms of celebration. Some people may appreciate public recognition, while others might prefer a private note of thanks. Understanding what makes each employee feel valued is key to effective recognition.

Create some Routines and Practices

Creating regular time and space to celebrate success in your schedules, processes and mental maps is helpful. For example, you can have a standing agenda point in your team meetings, discussion point in your daily huddles, a section in your weekly newsletter, a talking point in your 1:1 meetings or a question in a pulse survey.

Esablishing these routines and practicres ensures that achievements are acknowledged in a timely and consistent way. Perhaps more importantly though, it also helps people learn from others what celebration looks like, make celebration seem more common-place and provides regular prompts to celebrate.

In other words, routines and practices are a great behaviour-change tool for increasing the celebration of success.

Encourage team members to celebrate each other

It’s great when you’re celebrated by a peer or colleague. It often feels meaningful and genuine as you have a mutual working relationship with the person, and they tend to actually know what you do. Trying to create space for this can be a great thing to do.

A simple way you could do this would be to create space in a team meeting for attendees to give a “shout out” for someone else’s success. Something as simple as that could become a helpful peer-recognition routine.

Another simple thing your could do, with a slightly different emphasis, is to create space for team members to say “thank you” to each other. Again, in a team meeting, you could create a standing “thank yous” agenda point and routine. Saying “thank you” is very similar to celebrating someone else’s success, just with a bit of a different nuance around it.

Celebrate the small stuff as well as the big stuff

While major achievements naturally capture attention, it’s important to also celebrate the small victories. Whether it’s meeting a tough deadline or solving a minor issue, acknowledging these efforts can have a cumulative positive effect on employee morale.

They also help us break down big tasks into smaller ones, providing a regular sense of achievement, which we know is rewarding.

Consider creating some social / fun events

In some instances, it can be very helpful to create events and outings that allow colleagues to celebrate collectively. These can range from simple team lunches to elaborate yearly galas, depending on the achievement and the size of the organisation.

As we’ve discussed about, events like this help colleagues get to know each other and build their relationships.

Role-model it and pay attention to it

It’s important that team and organizational leaders actually do some celebration of success too. It’s easy to say others should do it, then just fail to take the time to step back and do so yourself. But the thing is, your team will do what you do, not what you say.

Celebrating success as a leader will not only boost team moral, it also gives you the opportunity to signal the types of things that should be clebrated in the team. These could include values and behaviours that are important, or aspects of work that matter.

Though it might feel hard to find the time to actually share and celebrate your own and team’s successes, it’s really important to step back and carve out time to meaningfully celebrate. Think of it as an investment when you do so, as a highly productive activity that will move the dial on your team’s culture and behaviours and which will yield rewards in the future.

Learning more about Positive Thinking is a good staring place for more research on this. Emotional Intelligence is worth exploring too, as are Self-talk, meta-mood and meta-cognition. It might also be worth checking out huddles and stand up meetings (a good place to celebrate success) and 1:1 meetings too.

We also think celebrating success ticks a lot of the PERMA boxes, so it’s worth checking that out too.

You might also enjoy our podcast on gratitude, which you can listen to below:

Celebrating success is a great thing to do and it’s something we should make space to do individally and in our teams.

For some of us, though, it’s a bit hard to do. It sort of goes against some of our cultural rules. For example, being humble is admired in some places and being stoic is admired in some places. To some extent, these behaviours are contrary to celebrating our successes, which can make it feel a bit awkward or uncormfortable to do so.

We don’t need to do huge celebrations though, to have them help boost our own and our team’s wellbeing and positivity. Just making small changes that give us a bit of space for appreciation, gratitude and positivity can help.

As a team, we try and make space to discuss personal and work successes in our team meetings, and probably succeed in talking about them about 75% of the time. We also make sure we spend time in 1:1s focusing on successes as well.

There are no sources for this – just our thoughts and experiences. If you think we should cite something specific, please let us know.

We’re a small organization who know we make mistakes and want to improve them. Please contact us with any feedback you have on this post. We’ll usually reply within 72 hours.