“My manager appreciates me too much” - said no employee ever
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the number-one reason people leave their jobs is because “they do not feel appreciated." When I led a team of content designers at Facebook, one of our challenges was maintaining morale during some difficult times for the company, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal. We also experienced a major re-organization where my team was moved from the Product Marketing organization to the Global Business Marketing org. Despite these stressors, we were able to improve the annual Pulse (Facebook’s annual employee satisfaction survey) results by 16% in an area we had chosen to focus on: “How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the recognition you receive?”
How did my management team and I effect this? We credit three things:
Create a culture of gratitude.
#thanksgiving. The week before Thanksgiving, my team and I blocked out 30 minutes to gather in a large conference room. We spent the time using the internal Facebook “Thanks” tool to express our appreciation to our cross-functional partners and fellow teammates. We played holiday music and brought homemade baked treats to add to the festivities.
Thank the thanker. Whenever I received an email that someone on my team was being thanked via the Thanks tool, I responded using “reply all.” I acknowledged the person receiving the thanks, and I added, “Thank you for recognizing them” for the person who wrote the thanks. That way, everyone involved knew 1) I saw this email; it didn’t disappear into my inbox and 2) that I supported the effort.
Pay attention. Encourage teams to close laptops and put down mobile devices in meetings, so they can focus on the speaker. Attention denotes appreciation for what's being said.
Recurring public appreciation.
Friday props. We managers maintained an online shared document where we’d add recognition notes about people on our team. As the leader, I posted those notes in our team group summary post on Fridays for our “Friday props.” It was a nice way to start the weekend.
Share posts/notes. My team made this easy, as content designers love to write. When they posted articles on the internal social network, the managers and I shared them to as many relevant teams as possible and included a note about why we thought people should read it.
Remind people of the positive impact they have on others.
Crowdsourced appreciation. A story that stuck with me was how a middle school teacher asked everyone in the class to write their name at the top of a sheet of paper, and then the sheets were passed around and everyone wrote one nice thing that they appreciated about that person. Some of the kids kept these sheets of paper into adulthood, because it was a reminder of something positive that others had seen in them.
We did an updated version of this on our team. Our intern created an online form where everyone on our team wrote something about each person on our growing team. She then compiled all the replies for each person and made cool paper momentos for each of us. I kept mine on my desk for the inevitable tough days when self-doubt crept in.
My paper memento
Having fun with “awards” at offsites or monthly meetings. At a team offsite, we gave out candy awards to celebrate the impact people had. They appreciated the recognition and c’mon, who doesn’t like candy? Our management team had fun matching different types of candy to the impact people had:
Taylor – Payday award, for analytical work that proved our team’s ROI
Daniel – Dove award, for being the peacemaker with advertisers (he covered two complex, challenging products: Billing and Integrity)
Vickie – Crunch award, for awesome work covering last-minute requests
Anthony – Skittles award, for colorful ideas for our new team slogan and poster
Chris – Junior mints award, for all the coaching content for our new team members
Jess – Milky Way award, for out-of-this-world ideas
Alyssa – Starburst award, for her leadership in the LatinX ERG, where she had the opportunity to host a celebrity who visited our campus
Emily – Nerds award, for improving our writing assessments for job candidates (and for answering “Wikipedia!” when asked in her interview about what she liked to read)
Kwan – Lifesavers award, for breathing life back into mobile app ads content
Megan and Nakisha – Smarties award, for our newest smarties
During the time we focused on improving our Pulse score around recognition, we tried several things in order to accommodate multiple preferences on how people feel appreciated. Managers need to continue having conversations with individual people on our teams to understand what recognition means to them and how they prefer to receive it.
So now it's over to you! How do you show appreciation for your teams and/or how do you like to be appreciated by your manager?