Latest / Women Who Ship / 10. Beyond Pizza Parties: Designing Recognition that Actually Motivates Tech Teams
Transcript
- Sarah Williams: Welcome to Women Who Ship, the podcast for women in tech who are tired of proving themselves in rooms they've already earned a place in and are ready to lead like they know it. I'm your host, Sarah Williams. Let's dive in. Sarah: Hey friends, welcome back to Women Who Ship. Imagine this your team has just hit a major milestone after months of intense stress. You're a manager, so to celebrate, you order up a pizza party and gather everyone in the break room. One of your team members, Tom, did an absolutely heroic work. To ensure that this milestone was hit. And feeling certain that you're making him feel appreciated while also demonstrating to the rest of the team what an amazing employee looks like, you call out Tom's heroic effort in front of the room and sing his praises. That being said, Tom is notoriously private. And as you are singing his praises on stage, he looks about ready to melt into the wall from sheer embarrassment. Meanwhile, Sandy is fuming in the back. You find out later that Sandy completely reworked the project documentation and spent weeks mentoring the junior engineers throughout the crunch. She actually craves public recognition, but her critical work was completely ignored in favor of Tom's flashy firefighting, leaving her feeling slighted and resentful. In this single pizza party, unplanned recognition failed twice. You publicly mortified an introvert who just wanted quiet one-on-one appreciation, and you completely ignored the critical glue work of someone who actually craves that public recognition. Throwing a pizza party or dropping a generic thanks team message doesn't motivate tech talent. When recognition is generic or not tailored to the individual, it can leave your best contributors feeling misunderstood and invisible. Now, don't get me wrong, not trying to bash pizza. I do really love it. But let's talk more about how the brain processes recognition. So this is wild. In your brain, genuine social recognition lights up the exact same reward centers as receiving a monetary bonus. And this is not a metaphor. It's exactly what researchers like Azuma and friends found when studying how the brain processes social and financial rewards in the striatum. And forgive me, neuroscientists, if I pronounce that wrong. When you give someone meaningful and personalized recognition, their brain registers it with the exact same neurological weight as cash. Could you imagine when I was a manager, if I could give my employees a bonus every day, especially my top performers, I would definitely have done it. That's exactly what giving recognition does for your team. But here's the reality. Gallup did a survey where they found that only one in three US workers strongly agree that they received recognition or praise for good work in the past seven days. So that means the vast majority, 67%, felt overlooked. And this is not fluff. I think sometimes recognition is treated like you're just doing your job. Like, why do you need to be told that you're doing a great job? But this is strategic. This helps your business because frequent, meaningful recognition directly boosts individual engagement, it boosts productivity, it encourages company loyalty and improves retention. All of these things are super powerful motivators for your team. But here's how recognition typically works in tech. And so I want you to imagine an iceberg. And you've got the tip of the iceberg that's floating above the surface. And then you have the vast majority of the iceberg that's underneath the surface of the water. So most leaders, most tech organizations are really recognizing the things on the tip of the iceberg above the water. So those are the splashy visible outcomes like fixing a prod outage or shipping a feature or successfully meeting an OKR. But here's the thing: so much critical work. is actually happening beneath the surface of the water. Things like keeping teams functional by writing documentation or refactoring legacy code, maybe mentoring junior staff, and even absorbing emotional anxiety during crunch times. And unfortunately, junior women and women of color are disproportionately carrying that invisible glue work. When managers are only celebrating the tip of the iceberg, these vital contributors remain unseen. So now looking a bit about our cast of characters. So we've got our private hero, Tom. Tom was the engineer who really did incredible things. I think everyone on the team would be happy to see Tom recognized for his contributions, but he deeply hates being put on the spot in front of the crowd. Meanwhile, we have Sandy. She's our invisible glue worker. She's an anchor on the team. She's worked hard behind the scenes to rework documentation. She's the one who's mentoring all of the junior colleagues and holding the processes together. She deeply craves public visibility, but her work is going unnoticed because nothing broke. Then we have our well-intentioned manager, the leader who uses default, one size fits all praise, assuming everyone wants the exact same type of recognition. And let me say it is very tempting to get caught in this trap. Oftentimes, if you don't know how your employees like to be recognized, then you'll tend to default maybe to what is your own preference. And the problem with one size fits all recognition is that there's a big disconnect. You're forcing someone who is quite introverted onto a public stage, which could actually feel like a punishment instead, while giving a quiet, one-on-one good job to someone who actually craves that visibility. And if we only default to rewarding those big vocal firefighting and flash over the quiet stewardship, the documentation, the sustainable execution, then we're signaling what type of behaviors are going to be called out on the team and rewarded. And for managers, recognition is not just a single checkbox you can tick off for everyone. Meaningful recognition lives on what I like to imagine as a multi-dimensional compass. And if you don't understand your team's preferences and map them, then your praise will miss the mark. So, thinking about that compass, these are the four dimensions of recognition. So if we think about north and south, that would be where the recognition occurs. So in public versus private. So in public forums, that's your large all hands meetings, maybe even your smaller team meetings, as well as public channels in Slack or in Microsoft Teams. Then there's private. So that is where you're in a one-on-one giving. appraise directly to your employee or you're just sending that private DM. Now, the east-west direction of the compass is who it comes from. So peers versus leaders. So in some companies, and the the company that I was in, there's a vibrant peer-to-peer recognition, which is often very valued. It feels really good when a peer who deeply understands what goes into the work calls out your contribution to the project. But then also having a leader recognize you can feel very validating as well. I still recall the time that a senior leader sent me a handwritten note for something I had done well. So next is the northwest southeast direction of the compass, which represents when the recognition occurs, the day-to-day moments versus the big milestones. So day-to-day is pretty self-explanatory. That's those daily moments where you're checking in and giving someone praise for what they've done. The big milestones are things like birthdays, major work anniversaries, and project milestones as well. The northeast, southwest direction of the compass is what is being recognized. So that's those achievements versus behaviors. So not just what was accomplished, but how it was done. So an achievement represents those OKRs, those large project milestones, and then a behavior are those things that are happening behind the scenes that are making the team better. Things like mentoring, documentation, and Fixing legacy code. Your employees are going to have a different mix of these dimensions that make them feel recognized and appreciated for a job well done. So I'm hoping now as a manager, you're thinking to yourself, okay, wow, I didn't realize all of this. How can I do this better? So fortunately, a group of colleagues and I put together a playbook that you can follow that will help you understand your team's preferences as well as audit your current recognition practices. So the first step is mapping preferences. This is directly related to those four compass dimensions that I just mentioned. So you want to stop guessing how each member of your team wants to be celebrated and just ask them. So you'll have your team members fill out a simple matrix rating of their preference on each of those dimensions that we talked through. So the the rating is just they love it, they like it, it's kind of meh. and not for me. So that would be across private, public, peer, leadership, achievement, and behavior categories. And then it's also really helpful if you can capture some notes on nuance. So in our example, Tom might say something like, Hey, it's okay to call me out in the small team meeting, but please don't do it in the larger all hands meeting. And another thing that's kind of fun is collecting some personal details about each team member, like a favorite coffee order, a way they like to recharge, their favorite fandom. It's just a fun way to get to know your team better, as well as provide a potential reward option in case you ever want to buy them a gift or something like that. The next tool is called the recognition retro. So you would run this just like you do any kind of brainstorming session. And you're looking for specifically around your team's recognition practices, what's working, what's hit or miss, and then who or what often gets overlooked. So use those same brainstorming tools you always do: sticky notes or a virtual whiteboard. The team and I that put this together suggest looking across different categories, things like life milestones, work milestones, day-to-day kudos, team or project wins, and then any structured or values-based recognition that you already have. So it was really interesting when we ran this for our own team. We had a few things that surfaced. One was people didn't really need to sign birthday cards. They kind of thought that was a little too over the top to be doing all the time. It can get overwhelming if you're constantly getting birthday cards. Our team said a quick Slack message felt good, but they definitely wanted them to be more consistent because it seemed like some of the managers were not always being consistent about sending those out. What they did want to sign cards for was for milestone anniversaries, like three years, five years, or 10 years. They did feel like that was something significant that they wanted to make sure people felt called out for. And then they also wanted to hear more about peer-to-peer awards that people had received and project milestones. As a result of this feedback, we in our weekly team meeting added a section where we really called out people who had received peer-to-peer awards and what they had received it for. And it was always really fun to celebrate the ways that people were having an impact on a more day-to-day basis. We did that every week. Now one word of warning and why you want to ask instead of assuming. At one time we had a manager who floated the idea of like a big awards ceremony, which does sound great in theory, but there were several people on the team that just didn't really like that. So getting real input helps you design something that fits your team perfectly. All right, this last tool is for you managers in particular. So when praise is specific and consistent, our brains do start to treat it like a real reward. But when it isn't, people tune it out. And you probably notice this yourself as a high performer or you know a high performer who acts this way. If you just say a generic, hey, you're doing great, the praise bounces off. Because especially for a high performer, they have already analyzed and probably overanalyzed the situation in their brain and decided what they did well or not. That's why you need to be very precise and observed in your recognition to make sure it has a better chance of landing. So it needs to be framed like when you did X, it led to Y. Very specific, especially for your high performer. So It would sound something like, hey, when you onboarded our new team member, I noticed that she was able to contribute to the team much more quickly. That's going to be much more specific and land better with your team. And then I'd also like to encourage you to audit your own patterns by asking yourself these three questions. First, am I always recognizing the same one or two people? Second, am I overlooking quiet contributors, documentation, or possibly remote employees? And three, am I rewarding fire prevention and mentoring or just that heroic firefighting? Now, if this episode resonated with you and you'd love to do something like this with your own team, You can do this if you're a manager or if you're even just someone on the team looking to improve your recognition and appreciation practices. So I'd encourage you to go to go.coachsarahwilliams.com forward slash playbook to download the free step-by-step instructions and team preference templates. I'd also encourage anyone to identify one person on your team whose invisible work, things like documentation, maintenance, unblocking the team, or mentoring, went unnoticed this month. Then I challenge you to deliver one piece of precise recognition directly tied to that person's preferred dimension. And remember to be precise, it should be when you action, it led to impact. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you found this helpful. I want to say a big thank you to my co-creators of the Recognition and Appreciation Playbook, Emily, Aiden, and Kat. You're all amazing. I do hope these tools help you better recognize your team and to celebrate the invisible glue work. Let's go ship some good stuff together. Sarah Williams: The conversation doesn't have to end when the episode does. Audio is an amazing way to connect, but I actually want to hear your stories. Whether you want to tell me how your first recognition retro went, or you're navigating the messy reality of industry shifts right now, come say hi. You can follow me on Instagram or find me on LinkedIn at coach Sarah Williams. Shoot me a DM and let me know what you're shipping this week.