Celebrating success and achieving excellence in global corporations is essential for sustained growth and business continuity. It helps to foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and recognition. Celebrating success also serves as an effective way to recognize employees’ hard work and dedication. Moreover, it encourages employees to strive for excellence by setting high standards of performance and providing them with the motivation they need to reach their goals. Global leaders and corporations should leverage this concept in order to ensure that their staff members are engaged, motivated, and productive. In this article, we will discuss the benefits, best practices, and ideas to celebrate success in your organization.
What Does it Mean to Celebrate Success in a Global Corporation?
What does “celebrating success” mean to you?
For the longest time, for me, it meant the year-end party that my company would throw out. We would meet with other employees, drink bad champagne, and brag about our accomplishments and hurdles from that year.
But you know what? I used to have such a good time. Back then, I was in a company with an awesome culture, a fabulous high-performing team 360°, and good leadership. And even though my direct manager did not recognize me, so many people around me did that I felt recognized enough.
And that’s because I was celebrated by my peers as a person who would bring value to the entire team. Each one of us would give the other “small gifts” for things that impressed us. I once received an apple or an orange (I can’t remember, it was a fruit), and the dude said, “this is for how well you handled those sales reps yesterday. Enjoy!” I remember looking at the fruit and thinking, “I just explained to them why they got lower commissions this time, but indeed it was a knockout explanation!”
My co-worker probably got the fruit from the kitchen. However, the point is not the object but the intention behind the gesture. They just wanted to acknowledge me. Back then, I would never have considered this small thing as “celebrating success,” but today, I do.
Do you know why?
Because I felt celebrated. I felt they celebrated something I was also proud of.
For me, “celebrating someone’s success” means celebrating someone’s victory that they are also proud of, be it a very small or a very big victory or success.
So why would you do that? Why would you take the time to celebrate success for yourself or other people in global leadership? Let me briefly discuss a few points which you can benefit from.
What’s The Difference Between Celebration And Recognition?
Celebration can be a form of recognition or used as an event to recognize a person, teams or corporate achievements. There are several different types of recognition, most notably:
- Written Praise
- Verbal Praise
- Bonuses and Cash Awards
- Gifts and Presents
- Awards, Plaques and Trophies
- Celebrations, Parties, Social or Cultural Gatherings And Events
Most companies who have a formal reward and recognition program make use of more than one of these types of recognition, alone or in conjunction, to promote engagement and recognize their employees.
These programs often describe in detail what types of achievements deserve each of these types of recognition, and how will they be delivered. For example, many companies celebrate employees’ tenure by sending gifts, sometimes along with a badge, plaque or little trophy, depending on how long the employee stayed with the company.
Some companies also offer bonus incentives for employees who stay longer with the company, which can also be considered a form of celebration and recognition. An example of this is the long-term bonuses or LTB. These bonuses are granted to an employee over the years, but only vested when they complete a certain number of years working for the company.
Tenure can be one goal for celebrations and recognition, but this is only one possibility out of so many. Companies can create any type of metric to celebrate their employees’ successes and expected behaviors.
The Benefits Of Celebrating Success In Global Corporations
In my experience as a global leader, celebrating success for myself or others or all of us had numerous benefits, but here are my favorites:
- Positive Work Environment & Culture: it creates a culture where people acknowledge, respect, celebrate, and collaborate with each other with a success mindset. If you’ve ever worked in a place like this, you’d feel in heaven. Given 2 equally fairly paid companies, employees stay longer in companies with a positive culture. After all, who likes abuse in the workplace or corporate bullies?
- Employee Appreciation and Retention: it helps employees feel appreciated and valued, which will help them stay with the company longer. It also helps them focus and perform better, which reflects better initiatives and higher profits.
- Collaboration & Team Morale: studies show that kindness can be viral. Kindness has the effect of producing serotonin, not only for those who received the act of kindness but also for those who shared it. Surprisingly, it also has the very same effect on anyone merely observing the act of kindness. That’s why it’s so viral! And when people show kindness, you feel compelled to pay back or pay forward. When more and more employees celebrate people’s success and show a sense of collaboration and kindness, this will be multiplied. How powerful! It’s not only the bad apples who have power, you know.
- Work Recognition: in the book Power Of Habit, Charles Duhigg says that habits are hard-wired in humans’ brains. Creating the habit of recognizing good work translates into doing it as second nature. The more you do it, the more people around you will do it too. Until it’s second nature and becomes an organizational culture. Even though recognition might not be monetized, real honest recognition makes employees feel valued, celebrated, and willing to repeat the good work. It also boosts employee morale.
- Reduced Stress: people who feel celebrated and recognized show lower levels of stress and better mental health conditions in general. And that’s because the act of celebrating and being celebrated creates dopamine and serotonin in our brains, and we feel super good.
- Role Models: when you celebrate success you become a role model for celebration, and the celebrated individuals become role models for achievement. Younger or less experienced employees will have a reference of what it takes to also be recognized and a reference to how to recognize when they are the ones to see good work. Humans need examples to understand what’s acceptable, and you’d be leading by example.
- Social Network: depending on how the celebration is done, you can also expand your social network. Other people who have the habit of recognizing superb work will approach to celebrate the achievement too. I met complete strangers on LinkedIn just by recognizing other people or when other people recognized me. The act of celebrating success opens doors, imagine that!
- Talent Attraction: it’s no secret that places known for celebrating success and recognizing employees attract young and ambitious talents. Who would not want to work for a place where they know they will be celebrated if they do good work?
How To Create A Culture Of Celebration Within Your Organization
Creating a culture of celebration within an organization is essential for employee engagement and motivation. It helps to boost morale, increase productivity, and create a sense of belonging among the team members. Celebrations can also be used as an effective tool to reward loyal employees for their hard work and dedication.
Employee recognition and appreciation ideas like awards ceremonies, team-building activities, special events, and gifts can help foster a culture of celebration in your organization. Not only will these activities make employees feel valued but they will also help build strong relationships between team members that will lead to increased success in the workplace. By creating a positive atmosphere where everyone is encouraged to celebrate each other’s successes, you can create an environment that is conducive to achieving great results.
Here are a few things global corporations do to promote a culture of celebration and employee engagement in their organizations:
- Offer informal celebration days every quarter for “kudos,” birthdays, and personal achievements
- Host quarterly workplace celebrations with food and prizes for professional achievements within the company
- Host cultural events with prizes and rewards to promote cultural interaction and celebration
- Provide an annual global or local conference for all employees to meet and celebrate
- Implement a year-end party where employees can exchange “Thank You Cards” or small gifts with those who helped them throughout the year
- Create a company Facebook page with company news that celebrates milestones, achievements, and “kudos” to individual workers
- Provide a special budget for gift cards and other small gifts for employees and managers to give out and celebrate without extra approvals
- Hire a studio to do a video collage of interviews, testimonials, and lessons learned from employees and leaders about their year achievements and distribute in public channels
- Ensure higher-ups participate in all these events, workplace celebrations, and initiatives, to lead by example
- Cherish and talk about successful people and leaders who have the habit of celebrating others on a daily basis.
- Share meaningful presents with your organization as a form of celebration. In 2011 the Americas president in my organization gave a $99 Fitbit device to all regional and global leaders, as a gift to celebrate our common achievement. He said the purpose of this gift was to help us keep healthy and motivated scientifically. Since then, I’ve been monitoring my steps, my heart, my sleep, my habits, my entire health. His way of celebrating had a huge impact on my mindset. Can this form of celebration get any cooler?
How To Recognize And Reward Achievements At A Corporate Level
By recognizing and rewarding achievements at a corporate level, companies can create an environment of collaboration and trust. This allows employees to work together more effectively towards common achievable goals, while celebrating milestones along the way. It also helps to foster loyalty among team members, as they know that their successes will be celebrated by the company.
International Corporations can start doing that by cascading main company goals into departments and groups. Aligning company goals with each department’s goals and objectives is essential for an effective reward and recognition system. Department’s goals and objectives must then be tied to individual employees’ goals and objectives. Each of these goals and objectives must have very precise metrics for achievement. Every employee must understand exactly what they need to do to be recognized.
If your corporation has more than one level of recognition or wants to celebrate milestones, then it’s important to also tie into this system what employees have to do in order to achieve recognition in each of the tiers or milestones. For example, in a sales organization, Gold achievers need to deliver 25% above their sales objectives to receive this price, besides 50% above their orders objectives without any of the CRM penalties (like forgetting weekly updates, for example). A silver achiever could be something similar but with different criteria, say 10% above sales with 10% above orders without penalties. Criteria such as these can be created for each organization, department, or at individual level. It’s important to create very clear metrics.
Another key point is that rewarding corporate achievement of goals is not only about success. It must also be about learning from failures. Big corporations must move from a performance mentality to a growth & success mindset. This new mentality requires a way to build metrics and criteria for recognition with a new approach. It implies creating metrics that also show improvement, not only the end results. This way, even if end results were not met due to external factors, the employee can still be celebrated and rewarded for all the effort and diligence they put in.
The Best Practices For Celebrating Success & Achieving Excellence in the Workplace
Some of my favorite best practices for celebrating success include:
- Setting A Reward System. Creating a clear reward system with a recognition program that rewards employees for their accomplishments and improvements. By doing so, they will fully understand the implications for their recognition in terms of career, pay, and exposure. This helps manage their expectations so that they can work toward a clear goal.
- Value Reference Booklet. Setting defined and specific expectations of what is anticipated from each employee level in terms of company values. By doing so, each employee has a clear picture of what they need to do in order to be recognized at each level of the organizational structure. For example, what you expect from a trainee giving a financial presentation is different from what you’d expect from a VP of finance giving a financial presentation. You expect both to be articulate and communicative, but how they will display this will depend on their experience level, seniority, background, and skills. To compare apples to apples, having a booklet with expectations by seniority level can help employees gauge how they should show company values at their level, and how they compare with their own personal core-values.
- Recognition Over Award. Recognizing their efforts with public recognition or their preferred method of recognition. By doing so, they will feel valued in a meaningful way for them. If their preferred method differs from what the company would do, stay open and try to accommodate. At the beginning of my career, I won an award in stock options. Back then, I told my company that it would mean a lot to me if they could convert part of those stock options into paid days off once every other week for six months, so I could complete my higher education program. I was so grateful to be able to complete my program, although they also gave me the stock options as well! But truth be told, I felt more valued and celebrated being allowed off days to complete the program than earning the stock options per se.
- Rewarding Engagement. Rewarding engagement can be very rewarding for organizations. Pun intended. Try creating a program or policy that encourages employee groups to take the initiative and come up with innovative ideas. By doing so, businesses can foster an environment of collaboration and creativity which will help employees achieve excellence in the workplace while gaining a sense of belonging. When I worked at GE, they promoted an inter-functional group aiming for EHS improvements. These employees, from different departments and different countries, were tasked to come up with innovative ideas to improve the environment, health, and safety while saving money for the company. They were recognized for their initiatives and innovations, and were extremely proud to make part of this group that helped many employees across the globe.
- Making It Regular And Deliberate. When organizations create a form of celebration that is deliberate and regular, employees will also create the habit of celebrating small and big things themselves. When I worked with GE’s Corporate Audit Staff, they had something called A.N.O., a business acronym for Auditor’s Night Out. Every Thursday night, we had a $75 budget to spend on whatever we wanted to celebrate our hard work and integrity. Some days we were too tired, and we did not want to do anything, but our managers and executives would always encourage us to do something small, even if it was visiting a library and purchasing a book, or eating ice cream somewhere nearby. Back then, I worked really, really hard and long hours, so hearing their encouragement to take time to celebrate myself made me feel very valued and celebrated.
3 Creative Ideas to Encourage Celebrating Success and Achieving Excellence in the Workplace
Celebrating Success By Sharing Success
One of our favorite ideas to encourage executives to celebrate success in the workplace is to match a small percentage of their salary and offer it to a charity of their choice each time they surpass one milestone. To make this clear, the employee is not paying a dime themselves, the company is! This could be in the form of a matching donation, or through direct donations. For example, employees who achieve an “Excellent Rating” could receive a donation allowance of 5% of their yearly bonus, for example, to any entity of their choosing, or from a pre-determined list. For exceptional achievements, the organization can say they will match that too. It’s all coming from the company’s pocket, but this is a way to double down the celebration. You can further create hype by creating pre-formulated Social Media posts that promote the employee’s performance along with their donation and the company’s donation.
Rewarding Success With Cultural Celebrations
Another great way to make it fun and encouraging to celebrate success is by promoting cultural celebrations or public celebrations for those employees who achieve goals or are rewarded by the company for their performance. For example, winners within a team can choose a specific culture to celebrate or even their own heritage culture, and use it as the theme for the group’s celebration. Another possibility is to give the achievers a menu of possibilities they can choose from to celebrate their achievement with the group. For example, they can select between themed happy hour, themed lunch, or themed days-spa. I once celebrated with my team in the countryside. They chose as a team the theme, format, and location of their celebration. All I gave them was the budget cap. It was super fun, and engaging, and we were able to connect and build further trust among ourselves.
Creating A 15-Minute Hall Of Fame Experience
How about giving your valued employees a 15-minute hall-of-fame experience? Once you defined who your celebrated employees are, let them know and hire a promotion company to create professional headshots and a short employee video testimonial that talks about their achievements. On the yearly celebrations date or the specific celebration event, you can also hire a special crew to work on your employees’ makeup and fashion attire. Your company can also send personalized postcards for their significant others or other people they choose, with links to watch their appearance at the celebration. The links can be promotable and shareable on social media as well to add to the fun. This would help show the world how your company is fun, how valued employees are treated, and help attract other talents.
Tips for Hosting a Virtual Celebration of Success Event Across Multiple Countries
Hosting a virtual celebration of success event across multiple countries can be a daunting task. With the right planning, however, it can be a rewarding experience for everyone involved. Whether you are hosting a company event to recognize achievements or to celebrate milestones, these tips will help you make sure that your virtual celebration of success event is successful and enjoyable for all participants. From deciding on the best virtual celebration ideas to ensuring that everyone has access to the necessary resources, these tips will help you create an unforgettable experience for all involved.
Share How Each Country Should Access The Event.
It is important that everyone involved in your celebration understands where the party is going and what its goal is. To determine what kind of virtual celebration you should host, think about what you want to accomplish with this company event and determine how long it will take to complete the goal.
Some goals that your group can focus on are:
- Recognizing achievement milestones,
- Recognizing a success mindset and lessons learned,
- celebrating a special occasion or time in history,
- recognizing collective achievements over time,
- celebrating success stories of individuals or groups (e.g., the company’s team who won first place).
Once you have determined this information, you can determine what kind of virtual event will work best and which resources you will need. Once you defined the goal, event type, best time due to different time-zones, and resources needed, it’s a matter of scheduling and communicating.
I once participated in a celebration where all local teams in Latin America went to local hotels, and there, we were connected with other hotels across Latin America with our local teams there. Even though all teams were not physically present together in the same place, we could all see each other through the screens while drinking champagne. It was fun and innovative. We could also go to video booths, where we could send video messages as thanks or testimonials to specific employees or teams in other countries. Quite brilliant, if you ask me.
Define Safe Rules That Apply To All Countries
Not all countries have the same rules when it comes to celebrating in virtual environments, that’s why it’s important to check the laws in your country before creating any events. Some countries have banned celebrations of their national holidays in VR, but other countries might permit such celebrations or might allow them after certain consent letters are signed. Verify with your local legal departments and HRs what’s usual and accepted in each of the participant countries.
Here are some ideas:
- Can virtual celebrations be recorded? If yes, are employee consents necessary?
- Who can participate in virtual celebrations? For example, are contractors or suppliers allowed to participate, or only employees?
- How do rewards and prizes given in virtual celebrations reflect within the employees’ compensation and benefits?
- What are the prize amount cap and format to avoid extra tax implications for the employees?
Conclusion: Start Celebrating Success Today & Achieve Greater Levels of Productivity
Celebrating success is an important part of any business that has a success mindset, and it’s something that shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s a great way to motivate your team and keep everyone focused on achieving the best possible results. By recognizing accomplishments, you can help ensure that everyone is working towards a common goal and that the team is unified in their efforts.
If you are looking for an expert to help you implement some of these strategies, you can hire me as your executive and development coach. Have a free strategy call with me. We will go over your goals and devise together the top priority initiatives and their budgets.
If you are interested in developing specific global leadership skills to further improve personal, people, organizational, and cultural leadership, check out our online Global Executive Leadership Program. We go over all 4 of The Global Leadership Pillars® during the 9 online modules specially meant for global executives.
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