Scenario: Your team has just completed a major release and have made elaborate arrangements for a grand celebration. Suddenly, you get informed that there is no entertainment budget and that you need to hold back on any team dinner/outing!
At the outset, this might sound a silly scenario. How can there be no budget for celebrating a project completion or a major milestone? A company sponsored team dinner or outing seems a logical way of thanking the team (token of appreciation) for all the efforts put in.
Well, welcome to the world of spend approvals.
Compared to about 10 years ago, when employees used to get doled out lots of goodies and every small occasion called for a celebration; now-a-days the cost cutting regime that kicked in has effected an irreversible change in management mindset. Whats really amusing is that even large companies (some of the biggest in the market), which spend millions of dollars in purchasing product licenses, spend thousands of dollars in irrelevant trainings need elaborate justifications in spending a few hundred dollars on team events.
Even before we get to how to deal with the scenario, its worth to reflect and see whether these team dinners and outings are important at all!
I have a personal story to relate. Even after 6 months into my first job change (way back in 2003), I was still living in the past. I was never really engaged with my current team and obviously my colleagues would also see me as an outsider… One day, my boss tossed me the duty of arranging a team dinner (it was my turn on the round-robin). That was probably the first time I reached out to all my colleagues and managers to check their food, location and dining preferences. After having collected the data, it was my turn to decide among the scores of available options in a city like Bangalore.
I finally zeroed in on a relatively inexpensive open-air garden restaurant, slightly away from the city center, where they allowed our own music system and booze. I had pre-ordered a customized buffet, so folks didn’t have to spend time sifting through the menu. The time was well spent with lots of music, impromptu shayaris, dance, chit chatting and loads of swearing. I had arranged few CDs of rock music, Bollywood dance numbers and some old hindi songs (to suit the mood through the gulps!). I was the host cum DJ cum travel-desk operator…
That was an unforgettable team event. There was an acknowledgement and appreciation all around for each other’s hidden talent. There was an increased bonding within the team. My hard-shelled manager, architect and technical leads, who seemed from a different planet suddenly started appearing more human! Personally, my organization skills and meticulous planning was whole-heartedly appreciated and it changed the course of my engagement with the firm. More importantly, that helped me find a footing in my team.
I am sure every one of us would have similar stories to share.
The team outings and events are not just to celebrate the team success of a particular deliverable, but its a way of bolstering the “team” spirit. Unfortunately, the only thing that cannot be measured in team events is the Return On Investment!!!
So, why don’t companies spend for them? Honestly, many companies do include it in their budget. But many companies have huge bureaucratic processes that getting the spend approved becomes a project in itself (sometimes more challenging than the actual project whose completion is being celebrated)!
It is much easier if you are a project/product/program manager owning the budget and people as well. All you would need to do is to put in an estimation for such celebrations right at the project inception and budgeting phase. At each milestone, you would just be spending against that line item.
The problem is when you are responsible for the people but the budget is managed elsewhere (typically when you are within a matrix organization or have a globally distributed team).
Many teams have self-sponsored team events like monthly birthdays or pot-lucks or dress-up or CSR events. While these do engage the team to do something “different” and also help in team-building to an extent, nothing can beat a company-sponsored team event, especially after a really stressful period.
These team events are even more relevant in AGILE projects or long running BAU projects where there are releases at regular intervals and team members would be constantly stretched. Not to mention the production support teams, where every day would be eventful but there wont be a specific milestone to celebrate.
To get these team events approved, as a seasoned manager, you need to be on top of the spend approval, spend submission and reimbursement process. You need to know who is the final approving authority and what justification would ensure smooth approval! You might have to provide early heads-up to the approvers and get pre-approvals / in-principal approvals in writing! In the process, you might also need to do a hell of a convincing act with the approver(s) even before thinking of taking the team out.
As an old saying goes, sometimes God approves but his Priest doesn’t. So, while the sr. management keep talking about importance of team events, in the hierarchy of approvals, the very first level of approval itself will the be biggest stumbling block. As a manager, the onus is on you to influence the higher ups, who may not have the visibility of the magnitude of the deliverable but are in the approval chain.
If all efforts fail and you get questioned if the release was big enough to celebrate or if you could defer the team event or club it with another team etc., you might as well take the team out on your own and spend it from your own pocket.
For those of you who do spend from your own pocket (in many occasions, I do it as well), you just need to ensure to keep an upper limit of your spend above which you will get your team members to split the bill and be transparent about the source of funding.
Assuming you finally get the spend approved and all set to celebrate, here are some subtle things to remember. Be a little sensitive towards folks who have specific preferences (Vegetarians, Jains, non-alcoholics, non-smokers)… Try and be as much inclusive as possible. Many firms also insist not to book the table in the name of the company (to avoid being in newspapers the next day, if your team screws it up!). Its advisable immediately after the major milestone which makes the event more relevant (no one will remember a release that happened 6 months ago!).
More importantly, ensure you are not behaving like a boss even during the dinner / outing as well. Step back and let your team take over (right from start to finish). Your job, as a manager, was just to get the spend approved :). Let those brilliant ideas come from your team and you be the servant leader supporting them.
A parting thought for you to ponder over. Imagine you are having a great time celebrating a success of recently concluded release and you suddenly get a call from your boss that there is a major system outage because of the release; that the stakeholders are deeply upset and want to have a word with you right away!!!??? 🙂
(published 22nd Aug 2015)
