4 Ways to Celebrate Small Business Wins with Your Team

Building your team involves more than just hiring and onboarding; it also means helping them learn to thrive on hitting milestones and completing tasks. Businesses go through ups and downs, and along the way, it’s important to recognize the progress your team is making!

There are a lot of ways to do this, and each team will thrive with a different approach. I’d like to share a variety of ideas to choose from!

Finding What Works

Some teams love to have a bell that gets rung each time they complete a milestone. Other teams love to add marbles to a large vase so they can all see the progression.  And Other teams love to read about the weekly progress in reports or emails. 

Your team is made up of multiple learning styles and the mechanism for showing progress will change at different times.

What doesn’t change is the mental process of training the brain to THRIVE by releasing positive endorphins every time there is a success!

Finding the Right Celebration Rituals for Your Team

This is truly a win-win-win for the team member, the business, and for the supervisor. When the people on your team learn to celebrate their achievements, they’ll grow to love the process.

Here’s how it works: endorphins interact with the human brain cells and give a “rush” when activated. Just like social media users get a little rush when they see all those likes or hearts, we can train the brain to get a rush from successfully completing tasks – and a big rush when we’re able to celebrate that an entire project is completed.

Much of this comes from intellectually stimulating the brain and creating that positive associated response.

This is why it is important as part of the culture you build in your team to encourage people to recognize completion of tasks each day, each week, each month, and each quarter.

Ideas for Celebration

Here are some suggestions I have seen my clients implement when designing daily and monthly habits to celebrate those wins. Feel free to choose one or two – please don’t try to do them all!

• Hold short morning “standup meetings” each day and give 5 minutes to share what they’ve accomplished the previous day.
• 10:00 AM Slack Channel #MorningWin where everyone reports on one big thing they got accomplished that morning to start the day strong.
• 11:45 AM shout outs to recognize each other on projects they collaborated on and completed.
• Ring an audible bell every time a new client signs up.
• Play a celebration sound every time the company has a positive win for client.
• Place a large vase in the common area and move a colored marble from a bowl into the clear glass vase every time they complete a project.
• Hold monthly celebrations and recognize each person on the team who completed projects.
• Create a point system for helping move clients through to the next phase with rewards at Point milestones. 

Ideas for Implementation

Each business will implement these ideas in different ways; I’d like to share a story from my own experience to get your creative juices flowing!

In my days as a law firm owner, we celebrated the client journey on small cases by moving clients from Phase 1 to Phase 5 in an average of 3 months. Here is an example of how you can use that point system to celebrate moving clients forward. 

Example: 

• There are 5 phases in the client journey and on average, six humans are part of that client journey at any given time.
• 1-2 humans are only part of a few (let’s say 3) phases and thus can only earn a maximum of 3 points each. Another human might be involved from beginning to end and earn a full 5 points for helping move the client through every phase. 
• This ties in with knowing the workflows and workloads of a case as well as the involvement of different team members. That is what will determine the total number of points available on a case. In this example 20 points total available: 5 team members involved in 3 phases = 15, one team member involved in all 5 phases = 5.  (15+5 =20 total points).

When that pod was able to resolve multiple cases through different phases of completion, they were able to earn points. When they earned 100 points (milestone 1), they could celebrate with morning pastries or afternoon ice cream party. When they earned 150 points (milestone 2), they got a pizza party –  and when they earned 200 points (milestone 3,) they got their choice of 3 cool things (like tickets to movie theater or Apple music gift card).  

This is just one example – get creative! There are many different ways you can build up your team and get them focused on completion. This can all happen while being in alignment with your clients desire to move forward and achieve whatever it is they want to achieve.

Take time to orchestrate out that win-win-win and you will see your team thrive!