Events.
Good news is inventory, not cash. Stage it, stack it, and spend it when everyone's in the room.
Recognition is a production, not a readout, and I measured these in happy tears. Permission to have fun is a strategy, and it's cheap. And belonging isn't a tote bag: sometimes the best swag decision is making less of it.
A decade in startups and tech means I've worn a lot of hats, but internal comms was my primary job for at least seven of those years. At Flywheel I ran a department that owned it. At WP Engine I fully owned internal comms and employee engagement at a company of 1,300 people.
Good news is inventory, not cash.
The habit I picked up from the sharpest leaders I've worked under: you don't spend good news the week it arrives. You save it. You savor it. You roll it out to senior leaders first, then to managers, who get to feel like they were in on it, and who will flag the landmines you couldn't see from where you're standing. By the time it's public it has been vetted by comms and by whoever else has skin in it, and it tells a story instead of announcing a fact.
Then you put a good wrapper on it. A milestone doesn't have to be celebrated the week it's hit. When you've flown everyone in from around the world and you have every eye in the company at once, that's when the benefits change lands. That's when the new perk lands. That's when you talk about the headcount you're adding, the work ahead, and the hard stuff that kicked your ass last year and exactly how you're fixing it.
Because here's what's actually at stake. Put a few hundred people in a room where the only thing they have in common is work, and they will talk about work. The most immediate thing in their heads is whatever they just heard. If you don't want that conversation to be yeah, @#$% this place, I'm surviving, how are you, then make sure what they just heard was exciting. Make them feel like they're on a rocket ship. That is a schedulable outcome, and most companies leave it to chance.
Recognition is a production, not a readout.
It is very easy to collect some submissions, read a few out, pull a leaderboard, and say congratulations, you're salesperson of the year. That is a readout. Nobody envies a readout.
I want winning to feel enviable. I want praise given constantly and cheaply inside the company, and then I want it to compound, feeding into the annual review, yes, but mostly ending with you getting shouted out by the CEO in front of everyone while the nice things your colleagues wrote about you are read out loud. There's a script built from months of submissions. There's a secret person who tells your story. The reveal is staged, because a reveal that isn't staged isn't a reveal.
The Flywheelies at Flywheel was a couple of hours of stand-up comedy stacked on video vignettes, heartfelt recognition and deeply silly recognition, and people who won trophies knew it was an honest-to-goodness celebration of them, in front of their partners. Winning an award at work with your significant other in the room to cheer you on feels fantastic.
Supercharged at WP Engine ran quarterly, mostly because the company was big enough that annual recognition meant passing over too many people. I always joked that I measured these by happy tears. If I made somebody happy-cry at work, I did my job.
Permission to have fun is a strategy.
I've made fake commercials for nearly every retreat I've ever worked on. Ads for internal teams. Movie clips redubbed and themed to the work. It's cheesy, it's stupid, it's dumb work-culture shit, and people love it.
It also does a job. It's the ginger between two pieces of sushi, it clears the palate and tells the room we're changing gears, which is a real production need that most agendas solve with an awkward silence. And underneath that it's saying something truer: we're allowed to enjoy this. We're allowed to tell an unpolished, celebratory story about ourselves.
Good food, good branding, funny interstitials that fill time in a way people remember. None of it is the point of the event, and the event doesn't work without it.
We keep setting the bar higher and higher and the event was a smash hit!!
Phil was the screenwriter, the cinematographer, and the director of All Hands in December. It was a first for WP Engine ...
Oh, not to mention that he also created our very first virtual company all-hands meeting.
Belonging isn't a tote bag.
Swag is how a lot of companies try to buy the feeling of being on the inside of something. Some people genuinely love it. Some people are quietly furious about how much of their closet is company junk. Both are right, and you have to hold both.
During the fully-remote stretch of the pandemic I took the swag budget and moved it to a drop-ship store. Production meant nobody would see their stuff for months, which meant we only ever made exactly what people actually chose. Everyone got an allotment and picked what they wanted. Everything left unspent, including the whole allotment if you didn't want anything at all, went to a reforestation project. We sent over $50,000 to reforestation that year, and the people who wanted a hoodie got the hoodie they picked.
That's the version of belonging I believe in. It scales the same way in person: when you have everyone together, use some of that time to give back, volunteer locally, run or launch a fundraiser. Being in a room together is leverage. Spend some of it on something other than yourselves.