Creating Culture: Performance & Celebration

Purpose

Create a great company culture by encouraging employees to set high expectations for themselves. Then, celebrate their growth and accomplishments!

Consider This

If we took a flea, placed it in a jar, and then screwed the lid on, the flea would start jumping to get out. You would hear lots of pinging sounds as the flea tried to escape and bounced off the lid. Quickly, though, the pinging sounds would slow down, and finally, the sounds would stop altogether. You could then take the lid off the jar and the flea wouldn’t jump out. The flea would have been trained. It would no longer believe it could jump and get anywhere.

This scenario is similar to what happens with your employees. If you put a lid on your expectations for them, their expectations for themselves will lessen rapidly, too. They’ll no longer believe they can achieve great things.

How to Get Started

Setting high expectations

It’s important to let employees know, early on, that you have very high expectations of them. This doesn’t mean setting impossible goals; this means believing in your people.

Most employees actually have higher expectations of themselves than you do. When you have high expectations of your employees, you’re betting on them, versus against them. Start with talking about expectations in the orientation process. What are management’s expectations of employees? What are their expectations of management?

This quickly moves the conversation to key performance indicators, or KPIs. KPIs are objective measures of how a business can judge an employee’s performance. Make sure employees know the KPIs you expect them to hit and celebrate employees when they hit those numbers!

Performance management and celebration should happen throughout the year. They should never be just a one-time thing.

Celebrating success

What’s the cost of celebrating an employee? What’s the cost of not celebrating them?

If you don’t celebrate wins and goals achieved, people feel ignored or unappreciated. Employees begin to think, “Why should I do more when it’s not recognized?”

That’s exactly the kind of thinking you don’t want! So, take a moment – celebrate a good employee. Celebrations can be simple recognition events, such as praise during a stand-up meeting, lunch, or declaring a day as someone’s day. It’s really that easy.

The greatest reward for a leader is seeing people accomplish what they themselves did not think was possible. Take a vow to be a great leader. Do great things. Do small, simple things, like celebrating your employees. Aim to be the greatest shop to work for and you’ll find you have the culture you want.

Questions? Want more details on implementation? Please contact your business coach.