Teammate Celebrations

Here at Sourcegraph, we like to celebrate our Teammates’ work & life events. Below are sample milestones that we encourage our Managers to celebrate:

  • birthdays
  • work anniversaries
  • promotions
  • new babies
  • other life events

The People team is currently revamping our swag and gifting policies and will announce updates soon. In the meantime, please follow the below guidance

Celebrating a birthday:

Be considerate of all teammates and acknowledge that not everybody likes to be in the spotlight on their birthdays. Managers should check their employee’s BambooHR profile for their birthday and ask them personally if they’d like to celebrate it at work beforehand. With their permission, people managers will post about the occasion in a Team Slack (or directly via dm) and offer a gift.

  • The manager posts about the occasion in the team channel or 1:1
  • Team post suggestions:
    • Announce the occasion: “A huge #thanks and happy birthday to [name] on their [#] year anniversary at Sourcegraph! Please treat yourself to a $50 gift and celebrate yourself!”
    • Highlight the teammates’ key contributions and impact they’ve made
    • TIP: You can pre-schedule your Slack messages to send on the correct dates
  • The manager sends a gift within the birthday gift amount policy. Alternatively, you can let your teammate know that they can treat themselves and submit a reimbursement for up to $50 USD.

Sourcegraph encourages teammates to take a day of vacation on their special day in alignment with our Paid Time Off Policy. If a Teammate’s celebration happens to fall over a weekend, please be sure to take an alternate day such as the Friday prior or the Monday after.

To view and add the BambooHR “Birthdays” calendar to your Google Calendar, please use this link and perform the following steps:

  • Open your Google Calendar Settings
  • Click Add calendar
  • Click From URL
  • Paste link in URL of calendar box
  • Click Add calendar.

Birthday gift budget

Birthday gifts should not exceed $50 USD per teammate and per year. It is also advisable to spend the same amount for each person on your team when getting a gift for them to create fairness within the group.

Celebrating a work anniversary:

We love celebrating work anniversaries! Each manager is responsible for celebrating their teammates’ yearly milestones and sending a gift according to the gift amount policy detailed below. Managers can easily access all teammate anniversaries by checking their Bamboo HR homepage.

Best practices for celebrating a work anniversary

  • The manager posts a written or video message in the #thanks channel
  • Post suggestions:
    • Announce the occasion: “A huge #thanks and congrats to [name] on their [#] year anniversary at Sourcegraph!”
    • Highlight the teammates’ key contributions and impact they’ve made
    • TIP: You can pre-schedule your Slack messages to send on the correct dates!
  • The manager sends a gift within the anniversary gift amount policy. Alternatively, you can let your teammate know that they can treat themselves and submit a reimbursement for up to $XX USD.

Anniversary gift budget

Anniversary gifts should not exceed the following amounts per teammate and per year:

  • Year 1: $50 USD
  • Year 2: $75 USD
  • Year 3: $100 USD
  • Year 4: $200 USD
  • Year 5+: $250 USD

Celebrating a promotion:

COMING SOON

Life milestones

Other personal milestones such as marriage, baby announcement, and so forth, can be celebrated at the discretion of teammates. Sourcegraph does not have a budget for celebrating these milestones as they are not experienced by every person on a regular cadence. However, teammates are still welcome to celebrate these milestones if they choose!

How to send a gift

Loop & Tie

Our recommended gifting platform is Loop & Tie. Loop & Tie offers curated collections of gifts organized by price and shipping location (US and International).

Managers must have a Loop & Tie account to send a gift. To create a Loop & Tie account, please reach out to the People team in #ask-people-team slack channel and a current Loop & Tie admin (Kemper or Fabiana) will invite you to create an account.

Once you have an account, here is how to send a Loop & Tie gift.

Managers are expected to add their own credits to their Loop & Tie account using a credit card that is associated with their team’s budget. When you’re placing an order, you will see under ‘Your Payment Method,’ an option to select ‘Add Payment Method.’ This will prompt you to enter your credit card information like any other online checkout.

Loop & Tie FAQS:

  • Q: Will the recipient see the gift price? A: Your Loop & Tie recipient never sees the gift budget you selected. They just see the items available to them in the collection you selected!
  • Q: Can I change or add products to the collections? A: We are not able to facilitate changes/additions at this time.

Other gift ideas

If you don’t want to use Loop & Tie, here are some other gift ideas!

Branded swag

Custom internal requests:

External requests:

  • See how to send swag to people outside of Sourcegraph.

Sending gifts via mail

If you require a teammate’s address to send a gift, please ask the teammate directly if they are comfortable sharing their address for gift purposes. (While People Ops and managers do have access to address information, it is considered confidential and just as with other information of sensitive nature, we are unable to share it as with others).

Happy celebrating!

For any additional questions, feel free to reach out to people-ops@sourcegraph.com or the #ask-people-team channel in Slack.