How to appreciate your team members without spending much money?

In the previous article Why Appreciation Matters? we discussed why it’s important to recognize and appreciate employees and acknowledge their efforts. In this era, most of the employees want a quality work environment. They want to get quality in their life. If an organization fails to bring quality to their employee’s life, he or she is most probably going to get it from another organization.

In this article, we will continue our previous discussion. Here we will be looking into the ways of how you can appreciate employees or your team members, acknowledge and recognize their efforts for the organization.

Every employee has his own priorities, own ways to feel accomplished. Being a team lead/manager, it’s your duty to find out what motivates your team members. Most of the time, employees feel motivated by the things that cost too low.

Following are the few gestures that you can do to appreciate your team members.

1. You can offer a day off, after a hectic week. (not every week of course)
2. You can celebrate your little milestones among the team. Like your weekly or biweekly goals.
3. You can give some gifts to your employees. (suit, mug, decoration piece etc)
4. You can write an appreciation note to an individual team member. Remember, mentioning the name of each employee has much more impact than mentioning the team as a whole. Canva is a very good resource to design appreciation notes/cards.
5. Shout out your success on social media and acknowledge your team members in the public.

Examples

Let me share my experience, how I adopted this concept on my team.

• On the completion of a sprint(milestone), Our team lead writes an email to all the upper management that we have completed the sprint before the time given and all credit goes to the team. And mention every single team member.
• Last year, our team lead went on annual leaves and handed over the responsibilities to the team members. With full trust, like, he didn’t say that don’t do anything out of the scope. Because if things went wrong, you will not be able to fix it. He didn’t say anything like that and conveyed to the upper management that if anything goes wrong, just call my team members. They are available. And it all goes very well. On the day, when he returned to the office. He bought some chocolates, wrote a note thanking each team member to take full responsibility in his absence.

The results of all such gestures were unbelievable. Our team was finishing the tasks before the deadlines. We were confident, took responsibility, and worked as a team to accomplish the milestone.

“A person who feels appreciated will always do more than what is expected.”

Conclusion

In the end, the cycle of life doesn’t stop. Employers can get new employees. Employees can get hired by new employers. But things can slow down. The goal that you would have achieved in 5 years, can now take 7 years. Because some of your main employees left you and you have to spend time to train the newcomers.

If you are managing the team, what steps you do, to make your team members motivated and encouraged? Let me know in the comments section below.