Now that you have read about the issues within my yearbook staff during my senior year of high school, I'd like to go into the strengths that we had. I clearly made it seem like our staff was completely incompetent but the truth is that the editors and I were very satisfied with the final product and we did not complete this task just the three of us. Every school year, the staff is required to attend a workshop at a hotel that consists of spending the entire day learning about applying your theme to layouts. This workshop is extremely beneficial to the staff because they are more apt to listen to professionals rather than the editors. As editors, we were generally only a year or two older than the rest of the staff which meant that they did not feel as though they had to listen to us, therefore it was nearly impossible to teach them how to make layouts.
Because the yearbook is so important to the school's student body, the yearbook staff requires an application and interview process. After this process, we create a process team. Because this group creates an overall product over a long period of time, it is a process team. There is a lot of work that goes into the yearbook.
So What?
Because the creation of the yearbook is such a long and tedious process, there has to be rewards given in order to make sure the staff feels appreciated. From Daniel Levi, I have learned that giving individual rewards is good for motivating high performers but discourages team work. Because of this, we usually paired two people together to create a layout. Therefore, when they finished their pages, went to an event to take pictures, or simply seemed like they were working well together, we gave them positive recognition. We would bring in baked goods or reward them with a good grade. I say this because people were slacking so much with turning in assignments that giving poor grades to the slackers was what we turned to. We noticed that when we would reward the entire team, the motivation and morale in the class would sky-rocket. At the end of a large deadline when everything would be turned in on time, we would have a party with the newspaper staff during class time. We would order pizza and go outside and enjoy the day. This really got the staff at a good happiness level and ready to tackle the next deadline.
What Now?
Looking back on my time as a yearbook editor, I realize that I was probably more harsh than I should have been with the staff. They probably didn't realize that there were many other people that wanted their spot on the staff and that was why I had such high expectations of them. A lot of the staff thought that the class would be an easy-A and boost their GPA. I'm sure they all got a wake up call when they saw their quarterly interim grades. I would use scare tactics to get them to do their work. At the end of the book, we wrote a letter from the editors, recognizing each staff member for their accomplishments. This was somewhat like a team recognition program because we would reward them with a non-cash reward of just recognizing them through the book. We wanted the school to know how much time, effort, and skill went into the creation of the book. I think that by the end of the school year, the staff really appreciated the editors and understood that when we would edit their pages, we were really showing our perfectionism rather than criticizing them for creating weak pages.
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