Taking this virtual became very, um, manual. Doing a call-out on Slack on a Friday morning, and reminders through the day for people to direct message and then translate that across to our slide deck.

The intent behind this is to celebrate our team and we also thought it would be a great way for the team to regularly connect with our values, linking these call-outs with the values we want to recognise and celebrate. The inclusion of GIFs really was the icing on the cake and the value of building a product for your own team where you know what’s going to land.

Now at the end of each Huddle, we open the virtual BuildMeUp box and the team takes turns to read these out. For dramatic effect some even like to describe or even enact the attached GIF.

It’s wonderful to be able to adapt the platform for our purpose, such as expanding it to accept nominations for the recently introduced People’s Choice Award. This is a quarterly award we introduced and a chance for anyone in the team to nominate someone who has been a stand-out for the selected spotlight value using a story about how it's shown up. In the early stages of the platform this would switch modes to open for the nominations in the last week of each quarter. It now accepts entries for either all the time.

Like any services business, it’s really gratifying for the team to have something to invest in that is our own and to chip away at it in the background. It inspires creativity, the opportunity to play with new tech and to execute something that they had full control over. The platform acts as a chance for the team - most recently an intern - to jump in to either familiarise with our preferred tech stack or to build out new features.

Our team loves coming together and celebrating each other, it’s something that is genuine and thoughtful. Having the opportunity to not only build the platform but create something that has such an ongoing and significant impact on the team is so very Inlight.