Appreciation Matters
How many times have you felt demotivated even when you delivered a high-value work item? How many times, you felt that someone in your team delivered a high-value work item and you cared not enough to pass an appreciation? Appreciation doesn’t have to be in the form of bonuses every time. Sometimes, just a pat on the back, passing on a smile, or just a high five can do wonders. And, it doesn’t have to be from the manager, peer recognition proved to be a big motivational factor.
Scrum provides various opportunities to recognize and thank peers. In my experience as a Scrum Master for an offshore team, I started utilizing Scrum Retrospective as a point in time where the team is supposed to appreciate, say thanks, express gratitude to peers. The team started to feel the difference when appreciation was received. Even, they started to note the activities performed by others during the sprint, so that appreciation can be attached to a specific action performed within the iteration.
I have seen many organizations are moving towards bringing in the concept to gauge the happiness meter of the employees. In my current organization, we have a system of High Fives which caters to below sections of appreciation:
- People — our team is the heart of success.
- Customer — Customers come first and inspire everything we do.
- Integrity — We do right in the right way.
- Innovation — Celebrate the power of new ideas.
- Teamwork — We work as one team, one Vision
These are pretty much aligned to the values a team stands for. In order to keep appreciation simple and easy to reward, I used the Kudos wall so that Scrum Masters in my team can take a moment within a month to appreciate the efforts of their peers.
I see an emerging pattern that Scrum Masters now share Kudos card of all types within the Agile Group to appreciate new ways of retros, sharing the knowledge learned from the community and for being awesome always.
Here is a snippet of what we do:
Benefits of using this practice—
- Fosters trust
- Increase cohesiveness
- Reduces insecurities
- Brings Openness
- Above all, it brings a SMILE.
As you grow in your professional career, it becomes imperative to find small opportunities to pass on a High Five. You seek these opportunities while having your conversations with your peers and don’t miss any chance to extend an appreciation. Below are a few more examples:
The collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft teams also offer amazing opportunities to share the appreciation.
Even social networking platforms like LinkedIn recognize and understand the value of appreciation and have developed the system to promote this culture.
I am not the reporting manager of these people for whom I have shared the appreciation above, I am a peer to them. But this act has helped me to foster trust and collaboration. Now that the cycle has started, the team members are utilizing the system to promote appreciation. This whole exercise gives important learnings:
· Be always vigilant to explore the opportunity and extend appreciation. Even small wins matter.
· One of the biggest pitfalls is getting the courage to share an appreciation.
· Not only extend it to your peers or subordinates, share it even with your managers.
· Another challenge is getting the leadership to promote this culture and encourage their team to make the best use of it.
Having a culture of appreciation promotes the thinking that the team is not a feature delivery machine, also one must take time out in their busy schedule to look for such opportunities and share a High Five!!!
If you want to learn more about Kudo Cards, please visit the Management3.0 page.
