Gratitude at KnowledgeOwl

It’s the time of year when we all start thinking about what we’re grateful for.

In years past, we’ve shared posts about what some of our owls are individually grateful for. This year, we wanted to share more about how we practice gratitude at KnowledgeOwl.

While we do think individual gratitude is important, it’s also a concept that we’ve baked into a lot of our internal processes and culture.

There are three main ways we’ve done this:

• Announcements and appreciations

• High fives

• Warm fuzzies

These are all formal methods we have for sharing gratitude, both from ourselves to each other, but also from our customers, vendors, and other folks with whom we interact!

Announcements and appreciations

We have two meetings that are open to everyone on the team:

• A weekly meeting every Thursday
• Quarterly planning meetings

For both of these meetings, we leave the last 5-10 minutes for "Announcements and Appreciations." The announcements are usually things we want everyone on the team to be aware of. The appreciations are where we share ways we’re thankful for other folks on our team.

The appreciations can be large or small. Sometimes it’s one of us thanking someone else for doing a task that we personally didn’t want to do, or would have taken us much longer than it took them. Sometimes it’s just us appreciating our teammates for being who they are. Sometimes it’s us appreciating someone for being honest or pushing back on something during the meeting! And sometimes we’re sharing personally exciting announcements, like Erica’s latest art show. 😉

Both announcements and appreciations are entirely optional–you can speak up or not as you wish.

And since we’re entirely remote and use Google Meet, we can all add emoji reactions to pile on to someone else’s appreciation–so while one person might be the one saying an appreciation, if you’re on the receiving end of that appreciation, you might also get a lot of ❤️, 👏, or 🎉 too!

This section is especially nice in our weekly meetings. These meetings are where we hash out complicated issues. Because of that, they can involve some disagreement and debate. It’s a great way to close, and we NEVER skip it. It can help us all remember that despite having differences of opinion, we still value each others’ input.

And if nothing else, it’s a nice public way to thank someone!

High fives

For those of us who aren’t as inclined to public displays of affection, we also have "high fives."

We use an app called 15five to track how most of our owls are doing each week. The app has you complete a weekly check-in to rate how you felt at work that week, answer a few preset and optional questions, and give optional high fives to teammates.

While high fives are visible to the whole team, they’re usually only seen by the people involved in them or the person reviewing weekly check-ins.

High fives basically function a lot like appreciations in our meetings: they're a way to thank or recognize someone for something they've done.

Here, we include hashtags for elements of our company mission statement, so you can specifically tie a high five to the mission, if you feel so inclined.

For our more introverted teammates, or those who can’t make it to the weekly meeting, or those of us who forget to share things during the weekly meeting (Hi, it’s me, I’m the problem, it’s me.✋), this is also a great way to give a high five and directly thank a teammate.

Here are a couple samples of recent High fives:

Warm fuzzies

Both of the gratitude methods I mentioned above are about us being grateful for each other. This last category, "warm fuzzies," is much bigger!

As a remote team, most of our conversations happen in Slack.

Bug reports and feature requests–as well as critical feedback–all get shared in various ways. 

But what about those little thank yous or compliments that come up in the course of our everyday interactions with customers? Too often, that little bit of delight gets ignored.

Thus was born our Slack #warm-fuzzies channel.

Warm fuzzies are our oldest form of gratitude at KnowledgeOwl, and honestly, they’re my favorite. Most of our team talks to customers fairly regularly, and as anyone who’s done support knows, it can become emotionally and mentally exhausting after a while. No matter how much you enjoy it, answering the same questions or spending hours troubleshooting a complicated issue can wear you down.

What often gets lost is how genuinely positive and lovely a lot of our interactions are. Having #warm-fuzzies and encouraging everyone to share them helps us counterbalance the "people only talk about support when it’s negative" stereotype.

Warm fuzzies can come from almost anywhere. For example:

• Release feedback
  When I’ve notified a customer of a new feature release that they’d requested two years ago and they send me some positive feedback about how much they love it, I share this in #warm-fuzzies and tag the developer(s) who built the feature. Without this feedback loop, our developers wouldn’t get to feel the full positive impact of the things they build.

• Customer service surveys
  Anyone doing support at KnowledgeOwl has a link in their email signature that prompts you to fill out a customer service survey. When you fill out the survey after you’ve had a support interaction, any comments you leave might get shared, either by the owl you submitted it for or by one of the other owls who happened to see the survey response. This is a great way for us to highlight just how amazing our support and success owls are–which can be easy to lose sight of in the day-to-day grind. For example:
  

• Support interactions
  Even if you don’t fill out a survey, if you send a follow-up note or thank you to the owl you worked with, there’s a good chance they’ll post that in #warm-fuzzies, too. For example:

• Other feedback
  We pull warm fuzzies from all of our conversations, so if you’ve been in a best practice, support, or discovery call with our team, they may have jotted down some notes to share a warm fuzzy back to the team. Or when we have an anniversary or milestone with one of our vendors, or get a shout-out on social media, or get a new amazing review on a review site–any of these are fair game for #warm-fuzzies!

Final thoughts

Gratitude, like many things, needs to be a consistent practice for it to have power. We believe there’s tremendous value in having these dedicated methods and spaces to encourage gratitude, because it makes it that much easier to both give and receive it.

We hope you, too, find some great ways to show and receive gratitude. These days especially, the world can definitely use a bit more positive encouragement.

So even if your company doesn’t have a formal channel for this, we encourage you to let one of your coworkers know just how much you appreciate them, or to give some of that positive customer feedback to your whole team. It only takes a few seconds for you and it just might make someone else’s day!