Saying thank you always means a lot to your team members. In my former capacity as a university president I developed the practice sending old fashioned handwritten notes to say thank you to members of our university community and alumni. It might be for something special they did for our university, an award they received or just a thank you for being a member of our university community. I also emailed thank you notes. I wrote my own notes and I sent them. I would see them hanging in employee offices.
I also developed the habit of whenever I was in a university building to stop and say hello and thank you to employees who just finished a huge task, or to a maintenance worker doing a repair or cleaning in the building. i never entered or left a building without stopping to shake hands and say thank you to someone on our campus. It always made me feel happy and I always learned something about the employees family, their professional lives or there views on issues of importance on campus. I know it meant more to me than to them because it reminded me that everyone on our campus was part of our family, made huge contributions to our community everyday and we were a team, a family!
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