Success

What it is:
Success is more than just company success–it’s also about personal success. Success is feeling part of a winning team and feeling positive about the company’s reputation. It’s hearing and seeing innovation and other people’s success. Success is not just winning once but having a pattern of victories.

Currently only 50% of employees feel they are part of a winning team, and only 54% feel like they accomplished something significant at work in the past 30 days. And while 65% of leaders say they feel success at work, only 45% of individual contributors agreed.

In order to feel success, employees need to know what success looks like, understand how to be successful, have the tools to succeed, and feel their performance is fairly assessed and supported.

How it impacts culture:
People want to feel like they are part of a winning team. They want to go to work for organizations that are successful and leading in their industry. They are fueled by the confidence that comes with personal victories and wins.

When your workplace culture includes success, employees are more engaged, passionate, and driven. They experience more camaraderie and connection. They feel a stronger sense of ownership over their teams’ and the organization’s success.

How to do it well:
In order to facilitate employee success, organizations must allow and encourage employees to try new things and fail:

1) Create an environment of safe failure. Being able to take risks, fail, and learn from those failures is what spurs true innovation. When failure is an accepted part of the innovation process, there is 60% more great work that occurs.

2) Utilize special projects (see “Opportunity” term). Special projects enable employees to tackle new challenges and find success in multiple, different areas of the company. It helps them work on new things outside of their normal job scope.

3) Make success public. Communicate stories of success, share employee victories publicly, and spread news of great work happening at the organization. This shows employees what success looks like and how they can also achieve it.

4) Provide feedback more than once a year. Employees want to hear how well they are doing, and what they could improve on. Once a year is not enough. The annual review is only effective when combined with continuous one-on-one meetings, quarterly reviews, and daily conversations about performance.

See more best practices on how to make success public at your organization.