Celebrate the Awesome With Video “Wow Stories”


One of the best, and easiest to implement, ways of boosting employee engagement and strengthen your culture is to “Celebrate the Awesome.”
Perhaps no organization knows the power of this practice better than Ritz Carlton. Celebrating the awesome plays a central role in their “employee engagement, keep-our-culture-strong, and deliver-the-ultimate-guest-experience” strategy.
How do they celebrate the awesome?
They include “Wow Stories” in their daily team huddles. A wow story is a verbal show and tell that illustrates an employee delivering an amazing guest experience or embodying Ritz Carlton’s core cultural values.
Sharing these stories achieves three important organizational outcomes.
Just recently, I was talking with a client who wanted to help communicate his organization’s cultural values more effectively. His organization had undergone major growth, resulting in the influx of many new employees. Leadership was concerned that the outstanding culture might become weakened by this rapid growth.
Added to this concern was the fact that this company has a number of very high stress, highly demanding jobs. These kinds of jobs — such as customer service, tech support, and patient care — can easily lead to employees becoming weary, resulting in a degraded customer or patient experience and diminished employee engagement.
After sharing with him Ritz Carlton’s practice of “Wow” stories, we brainstormed ways his company could apply this principle.
For each of the ideas we discussed, I recommended capturing the stories using cell phone videos because:
Here are the types of videos I recommended and why.
1. Managers at all levels describing what they saw an employee doing that embodied organization’s cultural values or was just plain awesome. Doing this accomplishes the three objectives mentioned above.
2. Employees describing what they saw another employee doing that embodied the cultural values or was just plain awesome. This accomplishes several important objectives over and above the three previously mentioned. It also:
3. It fosters a sense of “I’m a player here” and “My voice matters.” Employees want to matter. Millennials especially want to feel like they matter. With employees playing a major role in capturing these stories, they get the chance to have their voice heard and make a difference.
4. Employees who “rocked it” are interviewed about the secrets to their success. This brings a deeper layer of knowledge sharing to the process. This type of video is especially useful with stories that involve customer service or delivering a great patient experience. By asking the employee to explore and share why they did what they did — their thinking behind it — and what they did that made the “Moment of Truth” so successful, you turn celebratory stories into significant knowledge sharing vehicles.
Often when discussing Celebrating the Awesome, the issue of whether doing this will be demotivating to people who don’t get featured.
I have two thoughts about this, one tactical and the other philosophical.
First the tactical
While you can’t control how others will react, you can obviously influence their reaction by how you frame this.
In communicating the rationale of Celebrating the Awesome, you will want to emphasize these messages:
Now the philosophical
Here’s my philosophical perspective on the issue: “What about those people who don’t get mentioned? Won’t that de-motivate them?”
This is where having kind, yet strong accountability conversations comes into play. If someone complains about “the same people always getting mentioned” I would recommend a conversation that first acknowledges their perspective and why that might be frustrating or de-motivating, and then transitioning into exploring why they think that’s the case.
As part of that conversation, I would invite them to be honest with themselves and examine whether they are doing things that are celebration-worthy and, if they don’t know, work with them to get clear on what they can do to be celebration-worthy.
It’s critical to address the “How come the same people always get recognized?” issue if it comes up, because the last thing any employer wants is negative peer pressure to prevail. You do not want the sub-par performers and the people with negative attitudes to make leadership fearful of recognizing, rewarding, and celebrating those who are doing great things.
Please don’t just read this and think “Oh, that would be a cool thing to do.”
Do it.
Be like LaVay Lauter, senior director Center for Learning and Development at St. Luke’s Hospital in Boise, Idaho. She attended one of my presentations at the June SHRM conference, the one titled “Why Your Employee Engagement Survey Doesn’t Cut It: How to Customize the Employee Experience.”
One of the practices we discussed was Celebrate the Awesome.
Unlike the majority of attendees, Lauter didn’t just like the idea, she acted on it. She went back to Boise and shared this idea with her team, which is now about to launch a video recognition program with the goal of eventually rolling it out throughout the entire health system.
Now it’s your turn. Let’s do this.