Learning how to celebrate with 🏆s

Using Slack’s Reacji Channeler to keep us positive.

Our web agency silverorange does amazing work, but historically, we haven’t been great at celebrating our achievements. We’ve always focused on what we can do better rather than what we’ve actually done. Even in the midst of our retreat reflecting on our best year ever, I still found myself focusing on a missed goal instead.

We’ve recently made it a team goal to stop and recognize our achievements together. This is partly a cultural change, but also something we’re tackling with better processes. And what better way to do that than to combine Slack + Reacjis + Slackbot? Seriously—that’s part of our solution and it’s been great!

Whenever someone talks about something on Slack that feels like an achievement, people will react with an emoji (aka “reacji”) of a 🏆. This triggers the Reacji Channeler to automatically highlight the post in our #trophy-chest channel for the admiration of the whole team.

An achievement can be anything from launching a major new site, to bringing in fresh baked cookies from home.

It sounds like a tiny thing (and it is), but it’s a small thing that allows us to:

• Recap the achievements from the previous week at our Monday team stand-up.
• Allow anyone to highlight an achievement. It doesn’t require a team leader to take special notice of it. Even our clients can highlight achievements using shared channels.
• Notify everyone, whether or not they’re a member of a specific channel, when an achievement takes place.
• Give credit to the team who helped make the achievement happen.

It’s a fun and meaningful way to recognize our achievements, and it’s another small piece of supporting our wonderful team.