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Wrap Up the Year Right: Regift Your Team’s 2014 Success

The end of the year is a great time for reflection and holiday-induced excitement, but it can also bring with it a desire to hibernate come December 1. Before your team turns into a group of grumbly, sleepy bears, it’s critical that you take action to recognize the past year’s success stories.

Wrap Up the Year Right: Regift Your Team’s 2014 Success

The end of the year is a great time for reflection and holiday-induced excitement, but it can also bring with it a desire to hibernate come December 1. Before your team turns into a group of grumbly, sleepy bears, it’s critical that you take action to recognize the past year’s success stories. While that seems simple enough, it does beg the question: are you ready to wrap up the year while keeping momentum, and getting your team excited to achieve 2015 goals? With a little help from us, you will be.

Bringing 2014 Wins Back Into Focus

There’s no doubt your team has conquered challenges throughout the year and celebrated some notable achievements, but how fuzzy is your memory of great accomplishments dating back to February 2014? Don’t let your team, or yourself, forget! Keeping those earlier successes top of mind right up to the very end of the year will ensure your team starts 2015 motivated to achieve even more.

So how do you hold on to those wins? Simple. Bring them back into focus. Hosting an event with a “Recognition Year-End Round Up” theme is a wonderful place to start getting your team lit up and ready to carry their momentum forward. You could also take it one step further and make “Best Recognition Moments of the Year” a new holiday tradition at your office Christmas party.

No matter how you do it, reflecting back is “really important and really good for your team building to get everyone to remember everything you've done throughout the year” says JJ Ramberg – host of MSNBC's Your Business and co-founder of GoodSearch.com. We couldn’t agree more!

Unite Your Team With a Little Extra Icing on the Fruit Cake

If you still have some milestones to hit before the end of Q4, blending recognition, holiday-inspired rewards and goals can help carry you and your team of champions across the finish line. If you’re on Kudos, getting your people the rewards they really want is a snap. You can reward creatively with your Kudos Custom Catalog by offering your team some well-deserved holiday incentives like an extra day off, tickets to a local ski hill or a gift card to a festive restaurant. Kevin Daum – Author, INC. Columnist and Executive Producer – recently outlined five great strategies that can be used in any combination for better holiday momentum:

  1. Set and establish both personal and team goals
  2. Determine the “Why” by defining a clear reason, purpose and mission
  3. Create friendly competition and set up exciting incentives
  4. Reward your team with some extra time off
  5. Establish what the company targets are and pair holiday rewards with meeting and exceeding those targets

To kick it off effectively and really get through that final push, we also recommend you host consistent team meetings to share, plan and recognize where people are excelling. You can use the Kudos Custom Pages feature to help your team see how you’re tracking to meet year-end goals and use your Kudos Custom Rewards Catalog to offer company-wide incentives for meeting or exceeding them in the new year. Letting your team know you’re all working toward a common goal, and recognizing team members frequently as they reach those goals, is a fantastic way to get everyone excited about making a difference where they can!

Make Positive Reinforcement Your 2015 Resolution

With your eye on the prize and deadlines fast approaching, it’s important to remember that positive reinforcement is what will truly help carry your team through the transition from 2014 to 2015. After all, accentuating the positive is at the very core of focusing on recognition. Performance Management guru and thought-leader, Dr. Aubrey Daniels, upholds that the most powerful way to realize long-lasting performance improvements is by implementing positive reinforcement. Dr. Daniels has identified 4 key results from implementing a culture of positive reinforcement:

  • Rapid change
  • Sustained, long-term and immediate behaviour changes
  • Limitless improvement
  • Unexpected and positive side-effects like increased engagement, discretionary effort, creativity and innovation

That’s not a bad list of results that can be brought about with a little recognition! Positive reinforcement is a critical part of team motivation and recognition success, and we want to give you even more information about how to use it effectively. So stay tuned for our January installment. It’ll be full of positive reinforcement strategies that will help you achieve your 2015 goals.

All the best this holiday season from us at Kudos, and remember, a Kudos a day keeps the “Holiday Slump” away!

About Kudos®

Kudos® is an employee engagement, culture, and analytics platform, that harnesses the power of peer-to-peer recognition, values reinforcement, and open communication to help organizations boost employee engagement, reduce turnover, improve culture, and drive productivity and performance. Kudos® uses unique proprietary methodologies to deliver essential people analytics on culture, performance, equity, and inclusion, providing organizations with deep insights and a clear understanding of their workforce.

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