Personalized yearbooks create buzz among employees at Klick
At Klick, the emphasis is always on the “how” when it comes to acknowledging team members for their help in making customers happy and growing the company — how we connect with people, how we show our appreciation in ways that are memorable and meaningful to them and how we align all of this with our cultural behaviours.
This is nothing new. Several years ago, beyond building career paths and development opportunities, we created the Klick Experience team (KLIX) to further support a people-first philosophy.
Mandated to proactively create meaningful connections through shared experiences, and to amplify culture and engagement across the organization, the team’s primary role is to make each Klickster’s experience a positive one.
They orchestrate an array of events that employees can opt into, including weekly team lunches, monthly do-it-yourself workshops (pickle making is so popular, it’s become an annual tradition), wellness and fitness classes in the onsite gym and personal interest-based clubs, such as Spanish language, arts and crafts and rock climbing.
To boot, they run biweekly onboarding sessions together with our people practices team and produce an entertaining monthly culture video.
While KLIX plays an important role in how we thank and recognize employees, it’s not the only way. And its success encourages us to continue looking down new and exciting avenues.
Memorable keepsakes
Just last fall, as we neared the end of another year of double-digit growth, we felt it important to ask: How else can we thank and recognize employees for their accomplishments and contributions to our culture and evolution as a company?
For us, the answer became very personal. We had recently explored the idea of creating personalized annual reports for each of our 700 employees on their individual “workversaries.” We loved the concept, but the logistics involved in publishing unique books on what could become a daily basis could be challenging and unrealistic for any organization, especially one that’s not in the publishing business.
In keeping with our commitment to the “relentless pursuit of awesome” — a mantra that inoculates us against the status quo and ensures we continue to experiment and innovate —we expanded our thinking and envisioned the amalgamation of an annual report with a high-school yearbook.
We agreed that it would still need to be personalized. It would need to serve as a tangible, memorable keepsake of people’s accomplishments. It would require a ton of content to effectively capture a year in the life of our company. And it would need to be produced and printed in less than two months in order to be unveiled at our annual town hall in early December.
Leading the charge, our brand experience team moved quickly. Team members collaborated with team leads from across the company who contributed content and ensured all internal stakeholders were represented in the book.
Leveraging technology
They also worked very closely with the development team of the Genome operating system that we built more than a decade ago to drive every aspect of the business, including project management, resource management, travel management and social interaction.
Thanks to that system, they could almost instantly pull into the book more than 1,000 data points on things such as our monthly social responsibility contributions, learning and development programs, on-site fitness and wellness program participation, technology usage and travel statistics.
By leveraging advanced technology, we also customized the hardcover book with personalized photo spreads of each Klickster and their closest colleagues. First, we used artificial intelligence to tag hundreds of photos from company events. Then, we built complex algorithms (using calendar, org-chart information and other work data) to surface the right photos in the right Klickster’s yearbook.
Finally, we added a “Class of 2018” section (with symbols denoting new hires and promotions) and pages for signatures, printed each person’s name on the spine and front cover of each book and called the 130-page compilation A Year of Klick.
My colleague Jay Goldman, who heads up Sensei Labs, sums the book up best: “This book is all about people. It’s about the different teams that we have. It’s about the events that we’ve run, and it speaks to the level of engagement that we have with our teams and all the individual Klicksters who make them up. It’s a way of us saying, ‘Thank you for all of the very hard work that went into making 2018 a huge success for Klick.’”
Launch well received
We anticipated the yearbook would be well received based on the early reaction to the concept from team leaders who helped with the content, but we didn’t realize the extent to which it would be embraced until our co-founder and CEO, Leerom Segal, unveiled the book on stage at the town hall.
There was a noticeable gasp from the more than 700 Klicksters in the audience. But the next morning, when we distributed the books in the office, that’s when the true engagement began as team members started taking their books to meetings and colleagues’ desks to get their signatures.
After receiving her personalized yearbook, one Klickster on the technology team said: “It’s really neat to have a tangible memento of the past year. I don’t think I’ve ever worked at an organization that gave a yearbook. It helps me feel more connected to (my peers) and I’m excited. I’m excited to write nice messages in other people’s books and see what they have to say about me.”
A year later, it’s evident the book has served as an amplifier and natural extension of our culture, according to Dave Holmes, director of employee experience and engagement.
“The yearbook has created a huge buzz in the office. It’s created a commonality and connection point that has increased engagement between Klicksters and captures an important moment in our company’s history.”
Sue Easby is the Toronto-based vice-president of people and organizational effectiveness at Klick, a health marketing agency. For more information on the yearbook, visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5j5TyxD5NM.
