The Wonderbly Culture Yearbook 2017
Culture is what happens 10 feet from your desk, all year
It’s already two thousand and eighteen. Two thousand. And eighteen. EIGHTteen. 18. Before we go storming into Wonderbly’s 2018 plans…and another year of new products, big announcements (welcome to our new CFO, Rebecca!), and exciting events… let’s take a stroll back through 2017.
Not another boring retro.
2017 was an enormous year for us.
Nick Marsh, our CPO, perfectly summarised a year of product launches on Twitter, as well as detailing the ins-and-outs of the interesting challenges faced when approaching technological innovation in children’s publishing. Amongst these retrospectives of the year just passed, my People, Culture, and Talent team had another 2017 wrap-up bubbling away…Today I want to show-off my favourite Wonderbly People, Culture and Talent side-project (and there were many): The Wonderbly Yearbook.
Nothing in business, culture, or people is truly new, but our team takes exhaustive efforts towards injecting our personal flavour into all that we do. Recognising achievements, thanking our teams, celebrating the good times, and working through the difficult. As part of every project taken on by the Wonderbly People team, we try our best to be creative in how we deliver our ~cultural brand~.
N.B I’ll have some more blog posts coming out over the next couple of months about our in-house #Ask_Anything bot, our Wonderbly Crowns awards, how we celebrate anniversaries and exits (including, but not limited to, Barbershop Quartets).
At the beginning of 2017 I had an idea to create a yearbook for the company as our Christmas ‘thank you’ for our team working around the world. Nothing unique, and something Zappos did (/does??) for several years (we even have a few copies floating around WonderblyHQ). What our team got together and created was beyond anything I could have imagined, and I thank everyone from the bottom of my heart for the hard work and out-of-hours dedication to our little passion project.
Yes, admittedly, our business is privileged in that we have a relationship with print houses, as well as a world-class team of in-house creatives, but I truly believe this project is achievable regardless of your business, and I’d like to share the tools to everyone reading, if you’d like them, of course. Let’s do that later on.
For now, without waffling any further, let me present to you The 2017 Wonderbly Yearbook. And, if you ask me, the first of an annual tradition.
So you’d like to do this for your team too? Easy. Let me give you some tools so that you, too, can start working on something really special for your team in 2018.
Recruit your Yearbook committee
Our team wanted to keep this as under-wraps as possible (surprisingly easy) so we recruited secretly as we needed throughout the year, and even publically mentioned the project once. We gathered a small team who had the skills we needed to get this project across the line. I’d suggest you recruit for the following roles at a minimum:
- Collect and manage the images + schedule/collect headshot images;
- Layout & artwork (designer, ideally);
- Printing logistics and costs;
- Copy, and;
- Project management (this was my role, although I became totally useless as the team figured out what they wanted to do and took the reins in the later stages)
Start saving everything early
Set up a Slack channel/Facebook page/Email thread/Dropbox folder/Flickr for anyone and everyone to drop photos into for the year. This was a distributed, global effort for us, so working asynchronously was important.
You will need to keep a running track of all funny, memorable moments shared by the team throughout the year, so we hijacked a #behind-the-scenes Slack channel, secretly storing anything funny or memorable. Some highlights below:
Decide on your Yearbook Headshots
We have an in-house photographer, phew, so we purchased a tacky 80’s yearbook backdrop and got scheduling tacky yearbook photos, as well as professional headshots for the whole company who could attend. You may already have company headshots, or team cartoon avatars, you could even use childhood school photos — your call! We have team members around the world, so we put the call out for awkward teenage pictures, or just a photo the team would be proud to see in print. It was a joy to look through everyone’s submissions.
This one may be the second-highest budget concern here, so you should be creative!
Use this template, if you’d like
Sharing is caring, people. (Indesign file.)
Printing
We went through Charlesworth Press (thanks Lee!), who we use to publish our books, but many companies are now making print on demand books. Ask for quotes and consider quality and time (the earlier, the cheaper, but also the more moments of the year you may miss out on). We printed in hardback and full colour, but that is absolutely not a requirement.
Get some nice gift wrap made up
We went extra, because why not, and made some company stickers and giftwrap to accompany our gift.
Closing notes, my two-cents
It’s a privilege to fill my role at a company like Wonderbly, a company which has developed an inimitable cultural fingerprint. The culture here is something very special, existing before I walked through the door. Part of my role in any business is, as my title suggests, to be a champion for the culture, the values, the mission; a role I fit into enthusiastically. Wonderbly has something special, and is very unique.
That said, these kinds of projects aren’t just reserved for creative companies with cultures like ours, and I believe that small additions like this, which celebrate your team, whatever their quirks, really do help bring people together to do their best work (and play).
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