Luckett and Farley has a great company rewards program in place, where any employee can reward another employee with a small quarter sized magnet with the letters “Spot 5″.  These are awarded for good work, working hard to meet a deadline, a defined accomplishment.  Then, a company wide e-mail is sent out that shares the reason for the Spot 5 with the rest of the company.  You take your awarded magnet up to the accounting department, and they give you a crisp five dollar bill, and you post the magnet in your work space on a magnetized surface, so everyone can view them. 

This past Thursday, I earned my second Spot 5 for working with a project for a higher education student housing proposal.  The concept designer, Sean, came to my boss, Jeff, and myself about 3:30 in the afternoon and asked us if we would help him brainstorm the masterplan with him.  At a conference room table, Sean pulled out photographs of a site map, drawings of nearby campus building, a roll of trace paper, and the three of us discussed ideas for campus housing.  After almost an hour and half of discussion, we narrowed the location of the footprint of the building down to two possible locations. 

As Sean was trying to figure out where to place the building for the proposal, he said he needed more site photographs and was going out to the site today to get them (the proposal was due the next day), and he invited me to go with him.  We got stuck in 5:00 evening traffic on the way out to the site, and took all the necessary photographs he needed for panorama views.  He bought each of us a soft drink to quench our thirst from the hot sun, and on our way back to the office we made a circuit around the campus in his car to get the big picture.

I came back to the office and helped him make titleblocks for his project in AutoCAD, and he was looking for  custom supergraphics to be in the backgrounds of the drawings, so I made those as well.  Around 8:15PM Sean orders some pizza and I finished my work after several test prints and modifications.  We ate some pizza with together, and I called it a night at 9:00PM.  Sean thanked me for all of my hard work, and remained behind at the office to finish his proposal.

Friday morning he handed me a new magnet, and I was happy with it alone.  However, people bumping into me in the office congradulated me with my new Spot 5 that weren’t involved with the project, and I wondered how many people Sean had told that morning after delivering the proposal.  When I checked my e-mail close to lunchtime, he had sent out an e-mail to the 100 people in our office, and gave me a very nice compliment (”…willingness to hop head first into any task, insatiable appetite to learn, and a ‘can do anything’ great attitude!”).  It made my day!  I got a string of reply e-mails, thanking me for my work from other friends in the company.  My lesson learned was that like academic settings with crunching deadlines, workplaces often have them too - where workers work up into the middle of the night.  However, there are rewards for hard work that are very satisfying.