A company’s overall goals can shape its culture. Take the popular “Employee of the Month” idea, when employees see it as meaningful, it becomes ingrained in the culture and can motivate higher performance.
But these goals need to be achievable, and sometimes making them achievable is a small matter of phrasing. Let me show you an example. For Canva, where I work, tenure is important. One way to celebrate tenure would be by marking when people joined. For example, a company can choose to give hoodies like this:
The problem with this approach is that it would be impossible for someone to improve in this dimension. Anyone that was hired in 2024 will never achieve having been hired in 2023 no matter what they do.
Instead, Canva celebrates Canvaversary (your anniversary of having joined Canva). It still transmit the same information: “tenure is valuable, tenure is important”. But the big difference is that every time you see someone display a Canvaversary badge with a number bigger than yours, it is a badge that you can acquire by staying around long enough. It is an achievable goal.
My laptop now has these stickers:
And I also have this beautiful pin:
Oh, and at the five year mark they make a poster of you. They are really good. I’m looking forward to my 5 years at Canva poster.