Revamping the Recognition Board Feature at 7Geese

Grease Week

Once a quarter, everyone at 7Geese takes one week to work on a project of their choosing that they feel will help the product. We call this Grease Week (or sometimes, Geese Week). The main idea is that we take a short break from our overarching roadmap features and give attention to anything that anyone feels they could improve. Someone might take the time to improve tooling, write documentation, pay back technical debt, work on experimental features, or re-design current features. There’s only one rule for Geese Week: at the end of the week, you present what you’ve been working on to the rest of the team and :shipit:

Another cool thing is that Geese Week projects often become actual features! The recognition board in the GIF above is one of those projects. It’s an interface that is meant to be displayed on a television in your office to show which team members have been recently recognized for their awesome contributions. Our super talented designers created mockups for the board during Q1's Geese Week, and I quickly volunteered to turn those designs into JavaScript for Q2's Geese Week. After some design review and fine tuning, we’re finally ready to start rolling out the board to our customers.

What is Recognition?

Peer Recognition is a feature of the 7Geese platform that allows teammates to give each other recognition badges as a way to openly appreciate someone’s work. Every recognition badge represents one of a company’s core values. Awarding badges to colleagues helps strengthen each person’s alignment to those values while building team morale and making people feel more connected. It’s a simple, yet powerful action that parallels the way OKRs strengthen the alignment of everyone’s goals.

Harvard Medical School published an article a few years ago explaining how gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships. Since recognition can come from anyone (peers, managers, reports) it can help to unify teams, proactively reinforce good performance, and foster a sense of appreciation and belonging across the entire team. Also, new employees being on-boarded can quickly get a direct sense of what that company is about. And the public nature of recognition means people are noticing that your work is getting noticed.

The Tech

I recently wrote about 7Geese’s move to using React. This project was one of my first major forays into building a non-trivial application using the React library in the 7Geese codebase. Beyond that, the biggest challenges involved solving interesting problems that I don’t typically find in my day-to-day work. Most stemmed from the fact that the board is meant to be displayed on a TV, so there is no user interaction with the main screen (other than choosing some settings to get the board initially set up). Some interesting challenges included:

• coordinating the timing between several looping animations
• measuring different parts of the DOM depending on the screen’s size and resolution to ensure that the layout and animations performed as expected in different scenarios
• autoscrolling the <div> where recognition messages appear in the centre of the screen when the message is too long
• managing several different JavaScript timers (to ensure that the board loops infinitely) while sending off AJAX requests periodically to update the board’s content

In the end, it was a ton of fun to build! Every Geese Week is a breath of fresh air for the team, and something we typically really look forward to. And there’s only 5 ½ weeks until the next one!

If you like building cool things, collaborating with a super talented team, and want to work at a company with a great culture, 7Geese is hiring.