How do you foster a culture of peer-to-peer recognition among your teams?

A recognition culture is an attentive culture. This begins by encouraging a culture of recognition by seeing even the small things, ‘the email you did well’, ‘the presentation you did better than the first time’; this culture helps employees to excel because they feel seen and appreciated. A recognition culture also reassures employees, that their growth is also taken into account by regularly assessing the skills in the team and providing the appropriate training, support and space for learning. This type of culture recognises success and failures as learning opportunities ultimately creating meaningful, enjoyable experiences for employees to excel and grow.

Despite the advantages of recognition, many organizations find it challenging to cultivate a culture where it is applied regularly and proficiently. Common issues include a need for knowledge or comprehension of the significance of recognition and how to do it properly. However, even without proper tools, recognition can be facilitated within teams through a bit of manual labor, which can go a long way in fostering a culture of recognition. This effort can bridge the gap until resources and support are available to implement more robust recognition initiatives.

To foster a culture of recognition, it is essential to implement strategies that educate and train team members on recognition and align it with company values and desired culture. Provide clear guidelines and examples on how recognition embodies these values, encouraging team members to give and receive recognition in a way that reinforces the desired culture. Empower them to recognize each other regularly through peer-to-peer recognition platforms and reward those who actively live the company's values with tangible or intangible rewards.

If I'm giving someone an internal award, I like to scoot on over to LinkedIn and share the same praise on their public page. It's an easy way to show them that you are grateful and you want to help boost their career.

Public peer-to-peer recognition can be especially powerful in our remote world, and has the potential to foster and reinforce a culture of appreciation, gratitude, and kindness among distributed teams. Something that we've experimented with in Atlassian's Support Organization is posting gratitude prompts in our Slack Announcements Channel, asking employees to tag and recognize their teammates for doing things such as "going above and beyond for our customers" or "living out our values." What we witnessed was an outpouring of appreciations, totaling over 250 peer shoutouts in just a one week period. It was heartwarming to say the least and illustrates how a relatively small gesture can go a long way in terms of employee experience.

Ensure that you recognise behaviours and skills that you would like the whole team to grow in. As much as it is about growing a team of individuals, recognise cultural behaviours that you want to reinforce. Be objective about recognition, despite the fact that you may not have used a certain approach to achieve success, it’s about the success and not the road travelled. Reward the individuality and innovation.

Fostering a culture of recognition can go beyond rewards and great HR systems. Being generous with constructive feedback is also hugely rewarding for all and aligning it to the strategic priorities of the team or business makes it more tangible for the recipient and easier for them to understand why and how they made a difference - not just that they made a difference. Top tip from me, keep it simple and authentic.

To make kudos effective, they should be specific and timely. When giving a kudo, explain precisely what action or behavior is being acknowledged and how it contributed to the team's success. Timeliness is crucial to ensure that kudos are directly linked to recent actions, reinforcing Agile's focus on feedback loops.

While our internal recognition program has been a bit labor-intensive, it has successfully promoted a strong culture of recognition within the organization. This demonstrates that while fancy automated recognition platforms can be helpful, they are optional for everyone. Team members' genuine efforts and commitment to recognize each other have proven invaluable in shaping our positive workplace culture.

While it's great to have a framework for recognitions to ensure consistency and fairness, don't underestimate the value of informal acts of recognition, which you can incorporate in your day to day work: - Give credit to people's work during a meeting with high-ups. - Send impromptu messages to your team members telling them why you value having them in your team. - Cut folks some slack if they are under a lot of pressure and let them know their hard work is not going unnoticed. - Cancel that Friday meeting and tell people to finish the day early if they can. - Offer to take care of something on behalf of that colleague who is currently overwhelmed. - Bring some treats to the office to share with your team every once in a while.