BARREL

I came across a post by Scott Berkun not too long ago and it had me thinking about the idea of initiating positive change, no matter how small. I particularly liked this bit:

If we believe in what we care about, the burden is on us to find ways to reward those who provide it. It doesn’t matter how small the scale is: it’s our scale. If all I have in rewards is a thank you, then that’s 100% of what I can give. If I get good service at a bar, I can write a sweet note on the check about how great her service was. If I can’t spare the cash for a beaucoup tip I can spare 15 seconds, some thoughtful words and some ink. Or I can look them in the eye and tell them they gave me the best service I’d had all day (an award, btw, it’s possible to give daily). There’s always some way I can reinforce the things that matter to me in the universe, and I’m the only one that can do it. And if they don’t accept my praise and rewards, or if it means less to them than it does to me, that’s fine. It still keeps my cares and behaviors consistent with each other. I can look someone, or myself, in the eye and say “I am who I think I am.”

Everyday at Barrel, people do wonderful things. They produce creative work, they help team members, they come up with inventive solutions, or they improve processes. People are usually great about thanking each other in person or by email. After reading the Berkun piece, I wondered if there was a way to amplify these exchanges of gratitude while also highlighting the cool things and various wins happening each day. I wanted to avoid making this anything of a social performance platform or a gamification of employee recognition (we’ve experimented with these in the past with mixed results), so I wanted this to be very simple and anonymous. Perhaps a place where someone could spend a couple minutes crafting a nice thank you note that others could also see. This was the basis for the Sweet Board.

The Quick Turnaround

One Friday in March, I was working from home, so I IMed our developer Jessie Frazelle on Gchat. I asked if it would be possible to use the Twilio API to create a simple text-based page for one of our mounted TV displays. It would allow people to send a message to a number and instantly display that message. Jessie took a look at the API and told me it was no problem.

Around lunchtime, I got in and showed Jessie a crude sketch. My requirements were fairly simple: have an “X hours ago” stamp for each message and make sure that emoji symbols had to show up. “Can you get this done in time for BourbON Friday?” I asked. “Sure,” she replied.

A few hours later, thanks to Jessie’s super-quick skills, we were ready to test out the Sweet Board. We recruited a few people to help us test out the text-to-message feature as well as the emoji and made rapid tweaks. When BourbON Friday came around at 5:30PM, we unveiled a fully working Sweet Board. Prominently displayed for all the office to see, we announced it as a way for team members to initiate positive exchanges: a note of gratitude, recognition for an achievement, or celebration of a team win. From an instant message exchange to a demo in 5 hours, the Sweet Board was a very fun Friday experiment that was made all the more rewarding because we were able to ship on the same day. People reacted very positively and it’s been a fixture on our wall TV ever since.

Next Steps

It’s been wonderful to see new messages appearing on the Sweet Board. Some of my favorites include:

I just want to thank everyone for being such awesome co-workers. Makes Mondays easier.

Happy 1 year @ Barrel Lee!!!!! I’m so happy I work with you. Also, best uncle ever.

Really appreciate the Good Friday half day! And it’s extra awesome that the weather is beautiful out!

As the product’s evangelist, I still have my work cut out in terms of adoption. My goal is to get 40-50 messages on the Sweet Board each week (right now it’s in the teens), which means finding ways to encourage at least 8-10 people to message the Sweet Board once a day. We’re planning to build a widget on our Barrel Tawk site (our internal web water cooler) to give another posting option. And we’re also exploring ways to cycle in older messages as the archive pool grows over time to keep the board looking more dynamic. It’s still a very young product, and I know it’ll go through numerous revisions as we find ways to increase engagement.

At Barrel, we often talk about rapid prototyping as well as Lean and Agile approaches to UX and development. Such approaches are sometimes challenging to fully implement, and as we try them out on both internal and client projects, we pick our battles and make compromises along the way. However, it’s a real treat when we can fully embrace certain methods (sketch to code; guerrilla user testing; quick iterations) and put them into practice with real results turned around in less than a full working day.

Update: We’ve put Sweet Board on Github. Feel free to fork and modify for your needs!