Teams that click don’t fall from the sky. It takes time and focused effort, but keep going and your consistency will pay off. Enjoy our weekly tips for powerful team building ideas to inspire, develop and challenge your team. Click to read more for this week’s teamwork tip, founded in the research from O.C. Tanner’s New York Times bestseller The Orange Revolution, by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, and get your team on track to breakthrough performance.
Recently, I listened to a radio ad that highlighted Sir Isaac Newton’s Three Laws of Motion to make a point about momentum. What struck me as I listened was how closely related the dynamic laws of physics were to employee engagement, and how that drives employee recognition and appreciation.
The First Law of Motion states that “a body at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted on by an external force. And, a body in motion tends to remain in motion, again, unless acted upon by an external force.” In the area of employee management, we have all had people who fit nicely into the first category: “a body at rest”. When at rest, they take little or no action beyond the bare minimum, and seldom, if ever, add value.
It’s official ”“ I just wrote my 800th thank-you note! At an average of three minutes per note, that’s an entire work week of saying thanks.
I used to hate writing thank-you notes. I’d buy a lovely set of cards from Thanks, take a crisp envelope out of its crinkly packaging and begin to write out the address in my neatest handwriting. I’d stamp the return address on the top-left corner, making sure it was nice and straight, then I’d affix the stamp on the top right so that everything was ready to go”¦except for the whole writing-the-note part.
Teams that click don’t fall from the sky. It takes time and focused effort, but keep going and your consistency will pay off. Enjoy our weekly tips for powerful team building ideas to inspire, develop and challenge your team. Click to read more for this week’s teamwork tip, founded in the research from O.C. Tanner’s New York Times bestseller The Orange Revolution, by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, and get your team on track to breakthrough performance.
Remember the baseball movie epic Field of Dreams? In it, Kevin Costner’s character, Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella, hears a voice saying, “If you build it, he will come” with the accompanying vision of a baseball diamond. Heeding the call, he plows under his cornfield in favor of the turf and “he,” Shoeless Joe Jackson, and later “they,” others from the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, do come.
Hoping that life imitates art, many HR managers and leaders hypothesize that a recognition program is as easy as 1, 2, 3: sign up with a gift vendor, put your company logo on the standard web template and begin dispensing points, gifts or other awards. That works…if your only goal is marking 1, 2 & 3 from the to-do list. In reality, once it’s built, not too many come, not too much is accomplished and sooner or later senior management starts asking, “So why are we doing recognition again?” Effectual, strategic employee recognition, like other lasting and essential objectives, is not quite that straightforward.
When faced with communicating “bad” or “honest” news, it’s often tempting to sugarcoat, put it off, or worse still, climb back in bed, put the pillow over your head and wish it away. It’s human nature. We all fear the “shoot the messenger” syndrome. But organizations or managers who succumb to this temptation do so at their own peril. Worse, they miss a great opportunity to build trust at a time when it’s most needed.
