How does your team celebrate a win?

[Jimmy Seddon]

Hi Everyone!

Last Friday, myself and a couple others on my team had a last night as we successfully completed a Jira Server to Cloud Migration.  This took months of planning, testing, and communicating to ensure that we had as little impact to our end users as possible.  We were extremely happy and tired by the end of the night.

The next evening we decided to celebrate our victory.  This involved meeting at the one of our houses,

Having some drinks:

Playing some video games:

Watching some 90's action movies:

It was a great way to unwind and decompress, my question to all of you is how do you, your team or your company celebrate great accomplishments?

I look forward to hearing about all the awesome ways you have fun!

[DPKJ]

@Jimmy SeddonGreat way to celebrate.

On my side, my company is bit boring. Few good managers send mail of appreciation to the team, but other just sit and allocate more work.

But, we have a secret group in company where we celebrate everything with Beer and Pizza. Once the office hours are over, we connect projectors and play movies (mostly one man saving the day genre), get drunk and dance. In the end we cleanup mess, so nobody knows what happen last night.

TEAM WORK!!!

[Jimmy Seddon]

That sounds like a great way to celebrate.  And what people don't know happened won't hurt them ;)

[DPKJ]

Yes, and later these people force team to do some weird team building exercises, whereas beer is best glue for software teams :-)

[Vinod Ramadoss]

Hmm, i strongly vouch for a culture which celebrates not only success but also failures (considering the team has gone the extra mile in every aspect).

Coming back to the topic, in my team it is more of appreciation "wow" emails from top levels, and do have team dinners on big occasions. 

No matter what it is, we enjoy it anyways :)

[Davin Studer]

We have a few major projects per year. We usually finish it up with either a pizza party or a potluck. It's a fun way to celebrate the accomplishment. Also, we will typically go through out major achievements in our quarterly department meeting and our CIO will name people by name in front of the the group to show off their work.

[Jodi LeBlanc]

Great post @Jimmy Seddon - we have win walls and a GCconnex group filled with ideas to celebrate and appreciate each other. Not everyone likes to be recognized the same ways, so we use the 5 languages of appreciation at work to celebrate successes and show appreciation in the way that is most preferred by the individual so that it resonates with them and is meaningful :)

[Jimmy Seddon]

@Jodi LeBlanc that's awesome!  I'm going to pass this along it would probably resonate well in our organization!

[Jodi LeBlanc]

Thanks @Jimmy Seddon there is a facilitator certification on the course material, if you know anyone interested:

https://www.appreciationatwork.com/employee-motivation-workplace-training/

[Vinod Ramadoss]

Thanks @Jodi LeBlanc , sounds interesting, this is the first time am coming across this, let me try using the 5 languages of appreciation at work.

And special thanks to @Jimmy Seddon for bringing this topic , enabling such aspects to be shared.

[Jodi LeBlanc]

Thanks @Vinod Ramadoss it is a great tool! It also helps identify those who like public appreciation (eg. in front of a room full of people) versus private, where they are not the centre of attention :) 

[Pavel Junek]

Such a celebration sounds absolutely great!

In our company we regularly communicate successes and failures on projects at a regular meeting once a month. If we can successfully complete a larger project, we will celebrate it with my colleagues with some good food (grill, pizza, sandwitches) and drink (beer and wine). 

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

Hmmm, tough question for us at Botron. :)

We celebrate even with nothing special to celebrate. Almost every 2 weeks, we have things like spontaneous game nights, beer evenings, just an after-work chat.

The most common for a small team victory is the home-made gourmets and cakes. And because we're addicts, we try to overachieve all the time and then gain weight from sweets in praise of success :)

[Ollie Guan]

Usually we arrange group dinners and various entertainment activities.

[Jimmy Seddon]

@Ollie Guan that looks awesome!  Though I don't know that I would have the courage to sing in public.

[Sharon Helms]

We celebrate wins in a number of ways:

• pizza parties or donuts and coffee 
• after work gatherings such as happy hours
• shout-outs in our monthly internal newsletter
• quarterly project celebrations that highlight team accomplishments 

At the last celebration, our team received an award for "Happiest Happy Hours"!

[Jimmy Seddon]

Awesome Buttons!  Truth be told, I may have taken more than my share at the 2019 Atlassian Summit ;)

[Deepanshu Natani]

We start with a formal lunch for the entire team.

Then in evening after the office, the party animals in our team gather at one of the team member's home.

We fill the entire refrigerator with cans/ pints of beer like this:

We watch movies (usually a series like Lord of the Rings), get drunk, sing, dance.

At last (consider early morning, next day around 3-4 AM), we go on a short ride somewhere outside the city have coffee/ tea, some light snacks and return :-)

PS: Only the small group of party animals are aware of the entire celebration after formal lunch ;-)

[Jimmy Seddon]

That is impressive!  For some reason I'm getting a little thirsty right now ;)

[Deleted user]

For individual accomplishments, we have an "All Star" program, where team members submit names of people who exemplify core values or who go above and beyond.  They get a cash award if one of the top three chosen.  We also have Friday donut days and twice yearly corporate events out of the office.

[Dharma Ramos]

Food and shenanigans. Shenanigans included things like escape rooms, batting cages, go karts. Also quality time, which was a big deal because we were a distributed team. VP or AVP would come spend time with us or would have us travel to them.

[Brant Schroeder]

We have a small get together with cake and the CIO recognizes those that really went above and beyond and thanks everyone for their hard work.

[Brittany Joiner]

I work on a remote team and I feel like this is something that's actually a bit of a challenge with distributed teams. Celebrating together! For us it's mostly a celebratory email or congrats call, but I think we have room for improvement here! I feel like a lot of the ideas mentioned so far seems like in person works best, but I wonder what are some good ways to celebrate together when you're distributed? Would love any ideas!

[Dharma Ramos]

We did travel for face to face visits for our distributed teams from time to time. In addition at least once a month we would have videoconferencing meetings where we would take turns in the different sites talking about accomplishments. We also had a traveling trophy for whatever contest we dreamed up that quarter or year. In another company we did video game challenges and trivia contests over video conference. 

[Brittany Joiner]

These are great ideas!

[Fernando Bordallo]

Indeed! I'll be taking some of these to my remote squads :D

[Jeff Tillett]

I have to say that I'm probably in the "boring company" side of this.

We send out a congratulations email and tag a few "big wigs", and then mention the win in our monthly newsletter. For significant wins, our company also has a system in place for spot bonus recognition in increments from $25-$2000, so we try to throw some cash for project success as well.

[edwin vasquez]

Team lunches, Bowling, Dinners, Golfing, multiple ways!

[Fernando Bordallo]

If you ever take your team to australia, go lawn bowling! :D 

[Tim Keyes]

Hi @Jimmy Seddon 

Congratulations on the migration to server! (I know it was a couple of months ago but it is exciting to move to the cloud!)

Something the Jira Align team does is "shout outs" before our weekly team call to publicly recognize individuals and teams for their hard work.  We also send out company emails to highlight big wins and what the lessons learned from the project/ process were.  Having an alcoholic drink or spending time with the team away from work  is always a fun method of celebration as well!

[Shawn Kessler]

Yes, the Jira Align team is famous for its celebrations...especially during team meetups. We usually turn Austin upside down! Concerts, dinners, and other special events.