Company Celebrations
Celebrations are particularly important at startups
Startup life can often be hard. Big milestones can often be way off in the future and the day-to-grind of life is real for a small team with big dreams and ambitions. To keep morale high, it’s important to savor celebratory moments when you can. Celebrations can help build culture and connections and boost team spirit.
They can also, however, really crush your team as well if you don’t have an equitable approach for what you celebrate and establish some policies to keep celebrations positive and fair. It may not seem like such a big deal when you’re a team of five, but even as a team of 10 there can be some inconsistencies in what and how you celebrate that can create animosity and upset feelings on your team.
Establish celebration policies before you need them
It’s a really smart idea to ask an Action Learning Group to do a quick sprint and create some suggestions on what feels like good practices for your startup.
SOME THINGS YOUR TEAM MAY WANT TO THINK ABOUT REGARDING COMPANY CELEBRATIONS:
What gets celebrated? Birthdays? Weddings? Babies? Company milestones? Promotions? National holidays?
Who celebrates? When you have a celebration, when is it a team celebration vs a division or even company-wide?
Whose responsibility is the celebration planning, hosting, and clean-up? Celebrations can surface a lot of bias about who does this type of work in a company. It’s helpful to plan it out in advance so that the same people don’t end up playing the party planning role - especially if it’s not part of their official job description.
Budget How much money do you spend on celebrations? It’s important to be fair on this one so that one person doesn’t have a much more expensive party or present than someone else.
Where + when celebrations happen It’s super important that, if you are having a company-endorsed celebration that it takes place somewhere that is accessible for everyone (i.e. you can get there without a car) or that you coordinate the transportation. Celebrations also need to happen at a time that lines up for folks with outside commitments like dogs that need to be walked or children who need to be picked up. If you are going to have an event outside of work hours, you will need to give plenty of notice so that folks can make arrangements to be there if they have dependents or responsibilities outside of work.
Set policies early on and communicate them
In order to have celebrations be a net positive for your company, it’s helpful to sketch out your policies and plans before they become a problem. It’s also useful to keep the policies somewhere internally where people can find them and review them - like your internal Notion page or a company hub with your benefits and company directory. It’s OK to change your policy as you grow. What makes sense with 10 people on the team may no longer make sense when you have 50 people, so it’s a healthy practice to ask a diverse group of people to review the policies and to offer revisions or suggestions once a year to the leadership team.