Best Holiday Gift for Your Co-Workers
It’s not a gift basket or a coffee mug. It’s recognition.
Everyone loves a good specialty jam or quirky desk decoration, but what your co-workers really want this holiday season is recognition.
Above and Beyond
Last week I had a frustrating battle with some undocumented code and a wonky database table. I needed to add a record to the table but didn’t have the right tools to do it. The table had text fields that stored gnarly, nested Python dicts, and I kept getting the format wrong. Worse yet, I tried using pandas’ awful to_sql method to write to the table and I ended up mangling all the records (just a local copy, phew).
I sent off a frustrated Slack message to the team at the end of the day with a status update, then signed off. When I signed on the next morning, I couldn’t believe my eyes. My coworker, who is a data engineer and better suited for this task than a data scientist like me, had overnight re-designed the code base to sync nicely-formatted JSON files with the database table. No one asked him to do it, but it saved me and the rest of the team countless hours and headaches. He really went above and beyond, and I wanted to recognize him for that.
Recognition
Recognition is the second most important motivating factor of job satisfaction. Think about the last time your coworkers, your boss, or your leadership team recognized you for an achievement. How did it make you feel?
For me, the feeling reminds me of enjoying the view from the summit after a long hike. When you work so hard to achieve something, finally reaching the goal has some inherent self-satisfaction. But it’s that view from the top, that visceral evidence of accomplishment, that really makes it worth it. Recognition provides exactly the same visceral, socially-validated proof of accomplishment.
How and When to Recognize Team Members
If I had data on the potency of recognition (if anyone really does, please share!), I would expect the following.
- Strong positive correlation with the size of the audience
- Strong negative correlation with the number of days since the achievement
- Strong positive correlation with the authority of those in the audience
So, to maximize the impact when recognizing your team members, do the following.
- Use the biggest megaphone you can get away with.
- Make sure the individual’s boss hears it, along with other leaders.
- Don’t wait for that quarterly company-wide meeting.
Consider a Recognition Tool
One of my previous employers experimented with several tools that had recognition features built in. I remember using bonus.ly, 15 Five High Fives, and TinyPulse Cheers. A former coworker wrote a nice LinkedIn post about recognition and how they use these tools to “embed recognition into their culture.” Having used these tools and having experienced the culture they foster, I’m a believer.
Starting a Culture of Recognition
Perhaps calling specific people out for achievements is not common in your team, and you’d like to change that. I’m in the same boat, so here’s what I plan to do about it. I hope these tactics work for you as well.
- It might feel awkward the first time, but take a minute in your next team meeting to recognize someone’s recent contribution that made a unique impact. Then keep doing it every so often. Does it catch on?
- Post your message of recognition in a channel seen by many.
- Approach a senior leader or HR about adopting a recognition tool.
If you want to give a holiday gift to your coworkers that literally gives a warm and fuzzy feeling, give them the gift of recognition.
Who will you choose to recognize?
