Celebrate the Little Things

We are often told to not sweat the small stuff, and that’s good advice. Missing from that advice is the opposite: celebrate the little things. Recognizing small successes is a great way to show appreciation, boost morale, motivate bigger actions, and create a positive environment where those little things can build upon one another to create big successes.

A couple of years before I retired, I was tagged to lead an initiative to find ways to increase efficiency in our processes as there was significantly more work coming to our organization but there was no funding to add people. There was also no budget for this initiative or for big projects to accomplish the task. That being said, management was gracious enough to allow me to create and implement the program myself.

Since we couldn’t do any large projects, and everyone had to keep his/her day job, my idea was to focus on how individuals could streamline their own processes. I created a Champions Program and recruited analysts and senior analysts (the ones who actually do the work) from each department to be part of the leadership team as points of contact for potential projects proposed by our co-workers. I then worked with department managers and directors to get their buy-in to support the initiative within their teams. Consensus was that as long as the regular work didn’t suffer, we had the green light to proceed.

To get started, we had to ensure that everyone understood this was not about reducing headcount. I t was a chance to examine our processes and make them more efficient so when the additional work hit, we were not more buried than we already were. Having analysts and senior analysts on the team and having built up a lot of trust within the organization over my career gave us the credibility we needed.

Next, we created a reward system using an existing recognition platform and created medals to be presented to everyone who completed a qualifying project. We also created a dashboard showing the number of projects, time savings for each, and total time savings. This was posted throughout the building and updated weekly. Finally, with some difficulty, we got our VP to agree to give us a few minutes at each townhall meeting to recognize individuals who had completed projects since the last meeting. For the more significant gains, we secured time for the individual(s) to present their accomplishment(s) to the entire organization. Celebrate the little successes!

The recognition and reward program helped us gain solid engagement at the analyst and sr. analyst level as people were eager for the opportunity to be heard and proud to show how they had reduced cycle-time on a process, or reduced resources needed. There was no shortage of project ideas coming into our team and we gladly provided guidance and support to the individuals and worked with their managers to allow them to proceed. We quickly built momentum and reached critical mass for engagement – as proven by the results and the growing number of medals and certificates of achievement hanging on cubicle walls.

Most of the projects produced small gains in efficiency and we supported, and celebrated, any project that had positive results. Some wound up to be bigger than expected and provided process and communication improvements across multiple teams – bonus! Over the course of 18 months, in increments of mostly tens and hundreds of hours a year across numerous processes, we cut over 10,000 hours of manual work annually. That’s the equivalent of adding 5 people!

Taken together, those small projects, spread across individuals and departments, provided breathing room and allowed us to absorb the additional work without overwhelming our people. As the savings were spread widely with no one individual project producing enough savings to allow even a conversation about reducing headcount, all employees were secure. That was a big key to the initiative’s success as no one wants to work on something that will put him/her out of a job.

This example is from my business career, but the same applies in everyday life. Celebrate the little things with your spouse/partner, kids, grandchildren, friends, etc. Simply recognizing the little things that make life better will improve your mood, bring you closer to others, and may even spark positive change in the world.

www.RetiredandInspiredat55.com 10-02-2023