On awards and celebrations

Recently I attended the CIPD Wales awards dinner at the Cardiff City stadium. Despite not being a member, I was privileged to be invited as a guest of one of our suppliers. It was good to catch up with a lot of people who I haven't seen for some time. Ex colleagues, people I have worked with in other organisations, and also people who I work with currently supplying L&D.

There was a long list of people who were shortlisted for these awards. In some cases. 10, 12, 15 nominees. All good people, and good companies that have put in a lot of effort into their HR and L&D programs in various different ways.?

There are people who walked up on that stage who I knew and had worked with, and know the hard work they put into both HR and Learning and Development.?

And yet how often do they hear the words “Thank you”?? I think one of the reasons these awards are so popular and why people love being there celebrating,? and my goodness there was some celebrations going on, is because in our day to day life we don't always hear the words “Thank you”.?

We don't say thank you to IT for keeping all the systems going, but my goodness they know it when they go wrong.?

We don't say thank you to finance for balancing the books especially at this time of the year when for many organisation it's year end.

We don't always say thank you to HR for the work they do and making sure that health, wellbeing, recruitment and everything else is in the right form. But my goodness is something goes wrong, the first people we call is HR.

And we don't always say thank you to Learning and Development for the work that they do in maintaining learning systems, creating content, curating content, and organising courses.?

Signposting people to learning resources is a new and developing part of the learning process and yet some people seem to think this is almost us fobbing off people and it's very rare anyone says? “Thank you”.?

This may seem like a wallow in self pity, but it's not. Plenty of people say 'thank you' to me. I was listed recently as a “mover and shaker”. I think at my age any movement and shaking might actually cause me physical damage, however, it's nice to be recognised and we need to do this a lot more often.?

It doesn't have to be an award. It doesn't have to be a prize but now again just think of the people behind the scenes and just maybe say “Thank you”.?