Jul 2, 2018 2 min read

Sharing Appreciation for Fellow Highlanders

  • Culture
Jon Berbaum

Jon Berbaum
President

How Might We Share Our Appreciation for Fellow Highlanders?

Hypothesis

Creating a physical space to share our gratitude for one another will help sustain a culture where people feel recognized and appreciated for their contributions at work.

Experiment

We found a blank wall, grabbed some stickies, and got to work. Since a lot of our Customer Experience workshops rely heavily on stickies, it felt like a natural extension of our day-to-day work.

Result

The “Grateful Wall of Gratitude” (as it’s been named) is still a work in progress. We had a good run of gratitude stickies go up after we first set it up, but it seems to have slowed down a bit. A few things that may have contributed to this:

The wall is in a space that is central to our office but that people don’t actually use very often. Making that space more dynamic by putting our ongoing office board games over there might increase new stickie additions.

The wall isn’t good for remote team members (to read stickies showing gratitude for them, or to add their own.) We’re thinking about building a digital dashboard that will allow remote team members to easily add to this wall and to see when other Highlanders have appreciated them.

Overall, this experiment was simple enough to set up and positive enough in its immediate impact that it was worth it to try. We’ll keep you updated on whether it thrives or fails in a future experiment post!