Creating a Culture of Gratitude

Creating a culture of gratitude can super power an organization. All of my research, observations and personal experiments around creating an engaged workplace keep coming back to prioritizing this one simple practice. Organizations that exhibit a culture of gratitude create happy and engaged employees. It encourages individuals to think and work outside of their daily roles, it empowers individuals to be more creative and it creates a web of strong social relationships that increase employee retention and inevitably helps define an organization's identity.

The secret that most leaders don't realize is that, although important, it's not gratitude from the top that really makes a difference; it's instilling habits of peer-to-peer gratitude and recognition that really super charge an organization. There are two reasons for this. Leaders at the top cannot scale themselves to provide meaningful personalized recognition for every employee. Once an organization grows beyond 250 employees it becomes virtually impossible. Instituting practices of gratitude in the DNA of an organization however, can scale infinitely. The second reason is the act of giving thanks and telling someone how much they are appreciated, actually makes the individual providing the gratitude happier. 

Skeptical? Try this. Stop reading this blog, open up your email and send someone you work with a thank you. It doesn't have to be lengthy or thought provoking. It doesn't even have to be about something that important. It could be because they held the elevator for you or got you a coffee. After you do this come back to this blog. I'm willing to bet you feel a little better about yourself. And the more you practice this, the better you will feel. I'm a huge advocate of this practice. Every morning on my train ride into the office, I email one thank you note. Sometimes it's to someone on my team, sometimes to an employee in another group, sometimes to a client or sometimes to my wife or one of my kids. It's a habit I've been practicing for years and it automatically puts me in a positive mood every day. Inevitably, this practice also organically pays itself forward by the ones receiving the thank you. 

Another ritual at Solstice is our weekly "Awesomeness Award". Each week, anyone in the office can nominate anyone else for something awesome they did. The list of weekly nominations are emailed company-wide, and last week's winner picks the next week's winner. The winner gets to sit in the "awesomeness" office for the week, but that's really not the point. It's the selfless act of gratitude and recognition that is the real win. At the end of the year we give out a yearly, "Awesomeness Solstie" and it's not for the person who won the most nominations, but for the person who gave the most nominations. We started this tradition many years ago and it has undeniably helped instill a culture of gratitude in our organization.

Another practice we've employed is our mentorship program. Every employee at Solstice gets a Mentor; from our very talented receptionist to myself. An employee's Mentor is a different individual than their direct supervisor. The Mentor is tasked with being an unrelenting advocate for their Mentee. They meet every 3 weeks (at a minimum) for coaching sessions. Twice a year, the Mentor receives 360 degree feedback on their Mentee for more focused coaching, and also has the ability to recommend them for a promotion. When an individual is promoted, it is announced in front of the entire organization. The announcement is not made by their direct supervisor or an executive, but by their Mentor. The Mentor explains why their Mentee is being promoted and what actions they took to warrant this recognition. This is one of my favorite traditions at Solstice. It inevitably brings lots of tears of happiness from Mentors, Mentees and those in the audience. But this ritual is just as much about recognizing the Mentor as it is about the Mentee. The act of celebrating and recognizing the selfless act of listening and coaching further encourages the practice of gratitude and happiness in our organization.

Gratitude is a simple but very powerful tool that is incredibly under-utilized in most organizations. By finding ways to implement this practice for yourself and your teams you will undeniably increase employee engagement which will allow your organization to fire on even more cylinders. The positive downstream impacts are endless. 

I'll end this post with a heartfelt thanks (to you!) for reading it. Feel free to share your organization's gratitude practices in the notes below. 

-J