The power of #Wins-And-Appreciations
A brief ode to a Slack channel that makes my heart sing.
Life is full of things to be grateful for. Yes, it can be hard. Things go wrong. Stress and frustration happen. But allow me to repeat myself, and when I do, I invite you to sit with that for a moment:
Life is full of things to be grateful for.
I’m writing this at the end of a really long day. A bunch of things went wrong. I was stressed and frustrated. But I came back to the gratefulness. Today, I saw the backing of a team that really gels together when hard challenges are thrown their way. And in the midst of everything else; that is something worth being grateful for.
I believe in having a consistent, meaningful gratefulness practice. Call me a hippie if you must (you wouldn’t be far wrong), and it was from that philosophy that Konf’s#wins-and-appreciations channel was born.
At its most practical level, it means I have one channel to keep an eye on whenever I do my team, advisor, and investor updates, to remind me what wonderful things have happened within the business for the month.
In a deeper sense, #wins-and-appreciations is about building an organizational culture where noticing great work and thanking people for it is normalized and encouraged.
So what do we celebrate?
- New initiatives
- Celebrating our first few sales
- Delighting in our support tickets being dealt with smoothly
- Progress made, milestones hit
- New features launched, knotty bugs fixed
- People going above and beyond to help each other
In short: We celebrate everything worth celebrating!
Not gonna lie; the channel has become one of my favorite parts of the company. It’s wonderful to scroll back through time and think of the stuff we’ve celebrated in the past. Some of the early celebrations almost seem quaint now that we’ve evolved as a company — but even those are beautiful. “Hey, remember that time we celebrated having 100 users live at the same time for the first time” feels like such an ancient relic, compared to the numbers we routinely see these days. But the enthusiasm is real. The joy is there, off-grey on black.
It is about building an organizational culture where noticing great work and thanking people for it is normalized and encouraged.
Most importantly, it’s lovely to have a corner of Slack that is dedicated to celebrating the awesome stuff we’re doing across the company. There are plenty of other channels that are for problem-solving and overcoming challenges.
Having a little refuge of just joy and victories is a delight that I wish upon all of you. The great thing is: you can have that, it’s just two steps away: Create the channel and start ladling out those appreciations.
