Last Sunday for the first time I was taking 4 hours session for the aspiring facilities managers pursuing CFMI course. I covered the following topics through my weekly articles titled, Effective Communication and Reporting, Communication Strategies and Negotiation and Performance evaluation and Development. While discussing on Communication Strategies an interesting question came up from one of the participants: How will one ensure manager appreciates the work? He narrated: He carried out a maintenance activity in a very short span of time and brought back the electrical system into operation with no one noticing the failure, which in normal situation might have taken longer time. According to him it was possible because of his experience, knowledge and expertise he had. When he informed this to his manager, he did not find a feeling that expresses happiness or appreciation of this activity from his manager. Looks familiar right, all of us might have come across similar situation at some point in time. Even though I provided instant response, was thinking whole of this week and decide to bring out as this week’s article titled “Appreciation” Appreciation, irrespective of what level we are in the organization each one of us looks forward to it. If this is done at the required level will motivate the team to deliver results consistently. This enables managers to create teams with positive attitude & then to this team everything looks possible to achieve. Let me briefly talk about what are different methods of appreciations one could use in the work environment.
1. If you have practice of regular weekly/monthly review meetings with your team, it may be good idea to start the meeting with appreciation to good work done by few members of the team.
2. In the department’s or organization’s news letter select few customer appreciations and include them, with the name of employee or the team got this appreciation.
3. When someone explains you he/she did a great job, if you don’t understand the process you could ask them to explain what exactly was done and how it got done? This will help you to empathize and appreciate as well the employee feels happy.
4. As manager we need to understand the roles and responsibilities of everyone in the team. This helps providing appreciation at the right time.
5. Appreciate the good work done one-on-one or in open forum or write note of appreciations through mail or hand written one.
6. While sending appreciation mail, it might be good idea to cc your manager so that one level up also knows some good work done by your team member.
7. Apart from this recognize people through organization wide Rewards and Recognition programs as well. Employees who did exceptionally well gets recognized.
8. Employee feels happy and appreciated even mentioning someone’s original contribution in the conversation or communication.
Empathize the work done by your team members; understand how they get things done on ongoing basis. While we revert quickly on faults/areas requiring improvement, it is equally important to highlight the good work done by the team members. There many ways you can do this as part of your regular work schedule. Let’s create motivated team members around us, who want to take up more and more responsibilities.
