7 Activities To Celebrate Teams in Tech & Beyond

We all strive to create an environment that makes employees love coming to work. I’ve found that engineering-heavy organizations often fail to stop and smell the roses of their success. Success can mean launching a new product or feature, reaching a goal the team aimed for, supporting one another while in fire-fighting mode, or seeing an important metric soar. Celebrating wins—big or small—is a topic that’s usually underserved.

My group consists of 50 engineers, including product and delivery leads, and we decided to invest time in experimenting with improving how we acknowledge our successes. My hope is that sharing what worked for our teams will help you introduce more joy into yours.

In this article, you’ll find 7 types of activities we tried out. Each section will include the materials you need, an example of our implementation, and a description of the resulting team impact. These are meant to be easy, quick projects that can easily be plugged into your regular team rituals. So let’s begin! 

1. Concentrate the Love

Materials: Powerpoint, Google Slides, and screenshots

TLDR; Aggregate and share all the positive comments your customers and stakeholders express over time and share them with your group in a visually appealing way.

We wanted to amplify the small happy moments our group brings the rest of the company to remind people how much value they add. Every quarter, the leadership group aggregates all the appreciative moments our partners, users, and customers have expressed 

To do this, we search for words that represent positive sentiment. We look for positive phrases like “happy,” “love it,” “amazing,” “that’s awesome,” “great,” and “unbelievable,” and then skim through them. These dependably result in the kinds of positive feedback we’re looking for.

For example, we commonly do this search on our public team Slack channels.

These messages are moments of joy on their own, but they can be easy to miss in the sea of daily communication. Reading these happy moments all at once creates a more powerful impression that resonates longer.

2. Gratitude Videos

Materials: Smartphones

TLDR; Ask your internal customers/partners to record short videos on how the team(s) make their lives better. Play those back in group events.

Moments of joy surface when those you serve appreciate the effort you put in to support them, but those moments don’t happen often enough. It’s important to create habits that organically increase these opportunities. In our case, we asked teams and individuals to record short videos answering one simple question: 

“Describe a moment in the last 6 months where you appreciated a tool, service or individual on our team that made your life better.”

Every now and then you’ll also get a nicely produced one, like this one:

3. Celebrating Each Other

Materials: Cards, pens, and courage

TLDR; Get team members to express what they appreciate about one another (and optionally share these positive traits to the rest of the group).

Keeping track of our own success is important for keeping things in context. It’s easy to lose yourself on the job by focusing only on results and not the people you’re helping. Twice a year, our group will get together for an All Hands meeting where one of the activities includes mindfulness exercises to elevate us by pausing and acknowledging one another. 

Here’s how it works: We ask every team in our group to sit around a table and fill out index cards. They’re asked to anonymously write one thing that they appreciate about each of their teammates. In other words, in a team of 10, each member will end up writing 9 cards that they pass on, and at the end they’ll each have 9 cards written about them.

After everyone is done writing their cards, each member can volunteer to read the cards the rest of the team have written about them. This creates a couple of minutes where each team member gets the opportunity to vocalize what their peers appreciate about them, which reinforces their positive traits and behaviors. 

Another example: “What things are you grateful for at work?”

The net effect is a combination of appreciation, recognition, and strengthening of team bonds. This can also be a humbling activity, but the reminder of how talented the individuals on your teams are will inspire their peers. 

4. Cartoon Creation

Materials Needed: Individual team headshots, willing artist or Fiverr.com 

TLDR; Get illustrators to draw your entire team, and introduce the comics into various meetings.

One of our engineering managers had a creative idea: Take all the internal headshots of their team’s members and ask an illustrator on Fiverr.com to draw the team members in a certain style. 

In the quarterly review, the engineering manager surprised us all by introducing their characters into short comics. The result was a fun moment where the team felt seen, had their challenges and successes recognized, and meant we had a fun way of reflecting on a job well done in a lighthearted way.

We liked the creativity so much that we did the same at a larger scale for the rest of our teams, getting over 50 avatars and allowing team members to create funny comics that various team members showed up in. 

People carry so much unexpressed creativity, and by providing avenues for more expression, we see it reinforce other creative expressions that are work-focused as well.

5. Secret Project Preview

Materials: Secret projects, permission

TLDR; Get your team sneak previews from company projects.

Depending on your company culture, some R&D projects may need to be under wraps for quite a while. Central groups with significant exposure to such R&D projects can leverage that to request sneak previews. 

We found success by convincing a few R&D teams to let us check out those projects earlier than they normally would. Teams find the sense of exclusivity and early-access delightful, and it allows them to connect the company’s future with their everyday work.

6. Public Recognition From Leaders

Material: Your leader’s time

TLDR; Show up and appreciate, with details, your team’s impact.

If you’re a leader, here are some ideas that we found rewarding for our teams:

• Hopping into an individual team standup and appreciating specific successes
• Publicly calling out reaching a goal, milestone, or returning a service back to a healthy state, explicitly reinforcing the behaviors and impact of the team and work they're doing
• Calling out cross-team collaboration, with specific examples on what went well. We all assume working together effectively is just a requirement of the job, but in reality, it is one of the more difficult elements of our jobs.

Being specific helps demonstrate that you as a leader actually see your team members’ achievements. It also reinforces which behaviors are valuable for team members and their peers to focus on repeating or adopting across teams. 

7. Game Together

Materials: Capable computers or phones

TLDR; Introduce play and games into your team’s rituals.

This one is less about celebration and more about incorporating play into work. In today’s workplace, there are a ton of ways to enjoy comradery outside of the job. This builds stronger bonds and creates an avenue for new feelings to surface. There are tons of games the team can play together including a team-tailored Kahoot quiz. 

A Final Word

We spend over half of our waking lives working, we might as well try to create the best environment for that time spent. The net effect of caring about celebrating your team members is measurable through company-wide health surveys, and these activities have caused significant upticks in our team’s health, performance, and trust.

What ideas have you tried in your team(s) that creates a positive effect on your team?