How to Retain Staff using a simple, effective, talent appreciation strategy

Stop The Talent Drain and Retain Staff in Your Organisation by Celebrating Success

If you want to keep your best talent and retain staff, there are so many benefits of celebrating success. Here are just three of them…

Celebrating Changes your Physiology and Strengthens your Psychology

Celebrating makes you happy. When you celebrate, dopamine and serotonin are released inside your body, and you feel good! These are the happy brain chemicals, and they’re motivating and energising. Celebrating your wins not only feels good physically, but the emotions imprint the experience in our brain, which subsequently reinforces the behaviour, making it more likely to occur again.

The last 20 years of brain research have shown that positive emotions broaden the amount of possibilities we process, making us more thoughtful, creative, and open to new ideas. So how many of you would like your staff to be more thoughtful, creative, and open to new ideas?

So not only do the brain chemicals associated with positive emotions make us feel good, they dial up the learning centres of the brain. When a brain is negative, it operates in fight/flight mode and is narrowly focused on what can go wrong or on possible threats.

Shawn Achor, in his book The Happiness Advantage, says that creating moments of happiness at work can give organisations a real competitive advantage. Richard Branson has been regularly quoted as saying that having fun at work is the secret to Virgin’s success. It’s actually good for our brains.

Celebrating Strengthens your Connections with Colleagues and Team Members

Celebrating can put us in a peak state, and when we experience this state with our colleagues and team members, it strengthens connections. Having fun together is good for the team and relationships in the team and this is a key way to retain staff. Remember, emotions are contagious. When you’re in a peak state, you feel like you can accomplish anything, and new ideas or opportunities can be formed. People are more open and more likely to collaborate when connections are strong. Success behaviours then gather momentum.

Celebrating Success Skilfully Creates More Success

Because you get more of what you focus on and what we focus on shows up more in our life. You’ve all heard the expression, “What gets measured gets done.” Well, what gets measured and celebrated gets done faster and gets repeated.
If we look for and celebrate success, we’ll see more of it and get more of it. If it works for Olympic athletes, children, and successful entrepreneurs, it will work for you to help retain staff.

So what happens when you don’t celebrate success or acknowledge achievements?

When you accomplish something and don’t take the time to celebrate, you’re robbing yourself and others of that peak state that reinforces your success.

So much of what we do in our business and life is driven or limited by our psychology. By the way our brain is wired. So, rationally, we know that it is important to celebrate success, but emotionally, the act of celebrating might make us feel self-conscious or awkward, or we might not know how to express ourselves confidently and we succumb to the discomfort sensations and then we don’t do anything! Justifying that it won’t really matter. We think we’re rational creatures, but we’re not. We’re emotional creatures.

It’s the emotional aspect of things that derail us and stops us from doing what we know is important. If you fail to celebrate your team’s many accomplishments, you’re training your brain (and their’s) that what you’re doing and what they’re doing, isn’t all that important. If every day feels mundane, even when you are succeeding, people will stop giving 100% of themselves, and that will lead to poor engagement and lacklustre results. So simply put, the lack of celebration will lead to a feeling of pointlessness or lack of purpose that will result in less focus, less commitment, and decreased performance.

How can you become great at celebrating success to retain staff? Use our Winning Formula.

There are five steps in our Winning Formula:

1. GET CLEAR.

The first step is a planning one where you need to get clear on what success looks like for yourself and for every member of your team, and the next four steps are activation ones.

2. WEEKLY.

The second step is a weekly routine.

3. MONTHLY.

The third step is a monthly discussion with three important parts.

4. QUARTERLY.

The fourth step is a quarterly team tribute, which includes the whole team.

5. YEARLY.

And the fifth step is a yearly ritual, which might also include some awards or rewards.

Now, this might sound like common sense, and you might think you’re already doing it all, but what if we took whatever you’re currently doing to the next level?

Ready to learn how to apply our winning formula in your business? View the full MasterClass here… Great Managers® MasterClass Series