One of the most important pieces of a project in a corporate setting is to make sure you’re celebrating your successes. In an environment of endless issues and stress, if you don’t take time to celebrate and recognize the things you do well, they become part of the background noise. It becomes the norm to expect to move on to the next piece of work without so much as a thought of the success of the piece you just completed. People will get burnt out, morale will drop, and eventually you’ll have an unhappy team.
My team at work is wrapping up a pretty significant project; the project is slated to release next week. We’ve been working on it for months, and we just had users come from Tennessee to test the features before they go live. There were countless issues with testing environments and data, but despite these issues we were able to get through over 70 test cases in a matter of 2 days. That was shorter than they had scheduled for, so we ended up cancelling the third day and allowing the users to return home to their families instead of staying in a hotel for another night. My team’s leader is not here to recognize us, or celebrate with us, or take us out to lunch – things that are normally what happens when something of this magnitude happens. As a matter of fact, my team hasn’t had something like that since the first quarter of this year. I’m definitely feeling the burnout as the year winds down, because it’s been one stressful project after another with little recognition of the fact.
It’s important to celebrate your successes personally too. If you don’t celebrate, then your goals start to look pointless. There’s no reward for reaching a goal if you don’t reward yourself, so you’ll stop making goals because they feel like they don’t mean anything. Take a few hours or a day to just reward yourself when you accomplish something you set out to do. Go out to eat at your favorite restaurant, or buy yourself something nice. If you don’t get recognition from external sources, give yourself some kudos in whatever way you see fit.