The first exercise of my culture workshop is to capture all of the things that are good about the current ways of working, and the opportunities for improvement. What I don’t want during those two days is to lose sight of all the good things that currently happen as these are the foundations upon which culture evolution is built.

However, every team has a list of things it can improve and in almost every workshop ‘Celebrating Success’ is top of that list. It’s an admission that the team is running hard to hit its targets or deadlines, and yet once they get there they don’t stop and celebrate what they’ve achieved. Instead, they simply tick it off an ever-growing list and get started on the next thing almost immediately!

Does this sound familiar to you? These small moments of collective celebration are crucially important, not only for the culture of the team, but for the confidence of the individuals within it. It’s worth taking a pause to reflect on your achievements. 

Here are five reasons why celebrating success is important and some ways you can get started immediately:

✅ Recognition of good work

There isn’t a human that doesn’t benefit from being told that they’ve done a good job. Yes, it matters to some more than others, but knowing that you’ve produced good work is important not only for your self-esteem but also for your health. When we receive praise it releases a chemical called dopamine in the brain. Dopamine helps us to feel satisfaction, motivation and pleasure and long term can reduce the likelihood of anxiety, stress and depression.

✅ Increases confidence

This is a subtle trick that our parents or guardians demonstrate to us at an early age. The first time that you fell off your bike, they celebrated the good thing that you had done and encouraged you to do it again. Same with swimming, same with reading, same with any skill! It’s likely that when achieving a target or goal, people will have to stretch themselves either technically or emotionally, so taking the time to celebrate this will increase their confidence when they have to do it all again.

✅ Reminder of what you’re here to do

Another chemical that plays an important role in the brain is oxytocin. Oxytocin is released when we bond emotionally with the people around us. So, when we take time to celebrate success with the people who worked together to achieve the target or goal, it’s a reminder that not only do individuals have jobs to do, but also that they’re one part of something bigger than themselves. These celebrations increase the social bonds between team members and also provide a reminder that when you work together you can move mountains.

✅ Increases Optimism

No one can tell you to be optimistic. Indeed, when people try to do this it often destroys optimism! Optimism is not only the belief that (in a work context) tasks, targets and outcomes are achievable but also that should anything negative happen along the way, these moments are temporary and an opportunity for learning. When celebrating, leaders provide reminders of the tasks completed, the complexities that were dealt with and the barriers that were overcome in order to achieve success. These stories then become interwoven into future challenges and increase the optimism that they can be overcome. 

✅ Encourages a Break

And last, but definitely not least, is that taking the time to celebrate success actually forces people to take a break from the day-to-day. To take people away from task lists, emails, meetings and reports and to reconnect with those people that have contributed to the success. Tea, coffee, cake (and sometimes alcohol) can be incorporated to add to the occasion and if it’s a big success then a larger event where senior managers take a break too might also be appropriate. 

Here are three simple ways to experience these benefits and to ensure that you celebrate success more deliberately going forward:

1. Include a ‘Team Shout Out’ in your weekly meetings or monthly town halls —this can be to celebrate the achievements of one or more people in work completed that week

2. Plan in celebrations around key project milestones — it sounds obvious, yet often gets overlooked. Remember the celebration is a task in itself, so plan it in and don’t let anything compromise it!

3. Use celebration cards — print some congratulation postcards and encourage your team to write them for people who have helped them and leave them on the recipients desk (or do it electronically!) 

Celebrating success is a core attribute of vibrant workplace cultures and it isn’t something that’s done as an afterthought. There’s a recognition that celebrating the wins is crucial to ensuring future wins at an individual and team level. Or as Dr Gert-Jan Pepping, Deputy Head of the School of Behavioural and Health Sciences at ACU, found in his research: “The more convincingly someone celebrates success with their teammates, the greater the chances are that the team will win.”