After my post on our office relocation last week where we introduced the latest of our Epic Culture Creatures, Bright Spark, we’ve had a few requests to explain the whole tribe, who they are and how they came about.
Reward and recognition is a really important part of our culture at Epic, and several years ago when we were refreshing our Epic You program we created a few little characters to give people a fun way to recognise their peers. They were incorporated into both e-cards and physical cards, which team members could hand out to each other when they wanted to acknowledge them.
The original quartet were Buzzy the Bee, who means that someone thinks you’re the bee’s knees; Star, with a slightly more obvious meaning in that someone thinks you’re a star; Warm & Fuzzy, the workplace friendly way of either giving someone the equivalent of a big hug or letting them know they’ve made you feel loved!, and the little guy who’s turned out to be everyone’s favourite thus far, Breadman, who indicates that someone feels you are the best thing since sliced bread!
We knew the Culture Creatures had hit a chord when team members turned up to the Christmas party dressed as Breadman (nice work Stew and Sonja!) and have since seen them go on to play roles outside of their original reward and recognition scope, illustrating various communications, and even being turned into Post It Notes!
A new creature was created to be the face of the Epic Wellness program last year, CherryMan, and also provided the inspiration for the delicious boxes of cherries that formed our corporate Christmas gifting last year. We could have gone with that traditional fruity symbol of health, the apple, as our illustration but deliberately chose the cherry as we wanted to reinforce that making good health decisions isn’t about deprivation or sticking only to basics, but can still include delicious, luxurious choices.
Bright Spark is the latest member of the team, and not only helps flag when we’re working on something that requires all of our concentration but reinforces the importance of innovation, and encouraging people to have that ‘light bulb’ moment where inspiration strikes and highlights a new way of doing things.
The Culture Creatures have played an important role this past month as we’ve had two big teams move their locations, and recognising the enormous efforts team members have made in making these both so successful has been absolutely necessary.
Recognition is a vital part of building and maintaining great business cultures – you don’t necessarily need a team of characters to deliver it, but if you want to build a successful business you have to find ways to acknowledge what people do and let them know their contribution is valued. Like most things we do at Epic, we like to have a bit of fun along the way while doing the important stuff and these little guys help us to do just that.