Moments That Matter:
How WebPT is Building a Culture of Celebration From the Ground Up

On the WebPT website, they call themselves “passionate innovators and Nerf experts” and share their love for dogs, food trucks, and flip-flops. Core values include fun phrases like “Do Más With Menos”—preserving the scrappy startup mentality by being tenacious and resourceful—and “Be Minty”—keeping it fresh with positivity and spunk. The emphasis on employee experience is working: they’ve won multiple awards, including recently being Certified™ by Great Place to Work® for 2022.

Keeping this award-winning company culture alive is at the heart of Britney’s work as Employee Experience Consultant. She oversees every aspect of the employee life cycle: the new hire journey, recognition, surveys and feedback, milestones, and, most importantly, celebrations. Her role centers around one core belief: WebPT Members won’t get a good experience if their employees don’t get a good experience.

“For me, it’s about making employees feel genuinely appreciated on a day-to-day basis,” Britney said. “My goal is to make sure that our employees feel seen, heard, and know that they matter.”

How does Britney continue to build this culture in a rapidly growing company with a remote-work reality?

Listening for the Small Moments With Big Impact

The idea of personalization gets tossed around a lot these days, and yet it’s easy to take a lackluster approach. As B2B marketing expert and author Dave Gerhardt said in our recent interview, “Personalization is not simply listing the individual’s name and company in your email.”

It’s 2022. Those merge fields are a given. The same goes for employee engagement.

When you’re building a culture of celebration, employees see right through a lack of intention. Part of the WebPT culture is creating employee experiences that truly connect the company.

That’s why Britney takes the time to listen.

She has become a champion for WebPT employees by recognizing that it’s not always about the big achievements. It’s often paying attention to the in-between details that make experiences stand out.

“Listening is the most important thing,” Britney said.

But here’s the important part: “listening” doesn’t just mean asking new hires what they like to do during onboarding or keeping track of a list of birthdays. It means being diligent and getting creative in gathering data on how employees actually see your company—through surveys, employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS), even comments online.

“I conduct all of the surveys: new hire surveys, eNPS, exit surveys,” Britney said. “I read every single word that comes through in a survey as well as look at what the quantitative data says. ”She even leans on Glassdoor comments to understand what WebPT is doing well and what they could be doing better. She wants as much context as possible to ensure she’s doing the right things to build the right kind of culture.

“I am not the leader of people, but I am the overseer,” Britney said. “It's always important to be open to feedback and listen to it. And then to remember those small moments, because the small moments can sometimes matter more than the big moments.”

Ultimately, that’s what she is hoping to do as WebPT’s Employee Experience Consultant: make employees continue to feel seen and valued, long after they hop on board.

Listening in action

Britney designs and executes quite a few programs: end-of-year gifts, birthday celebrations, work anniversary recognition… not to mention the Spirit Week that led to the Backstreet Boys T-shirt.

Designing these programs doesn’t come easy.

It depends on intentionally building a culture of celebration by listening to WebPT employees, dreaming up fun ideas (Britney’s speciality!), and using platforms like Alyce to execute on those creative ideas at scale.

The insights that help Britney work intentionally come from multiple sources:

• eNPS surveys: Britney sends out a quarterly Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey that helps employees share their candid feedback. The results are sent to each department and leadership teams, so action can be taken. WebPT has consistently seen positive feedback at a higher scale.
• Internal feedback portal: It’s important to have an evergreen employee feedback model. When it’s not NPS time, the internal feedback portal is always available.
• Culture Council: The Culture Council is made up of representatives from each department. Nominations for Culture Champion, WebPT’s version of employee of the month, are blinded and voted on by the council. Each representative collects departmental feedback for the next Culture Council meeting, so it can be discussed in a safe, honest space to drive change.

Through these three layers, Britney can get a sense of what WebPT employees really want and need—not just what leadership thinks they need from a corporate perspective.

Britney actively works to take the feedback shared and apply it to a culture of celebration. This creates unique moments through the employee journey, with robust gift programs at both expected and unexpected times.

Three Ways Britney Harnesses the Power of Gifting

One of the first things Britney wanted to do was to make sure employees felt recognized throughout the year. The birthday program of sending employees a hand-selected gift was a start, but definitely not the end. Particularly in a rapidly changing work environment—growing employee numbers and moving from in-person to fully remote—Britney recognized that gifts could be used to create unity, celebrate special occasions, and strengthen company core values.

#1: Creating unity through celebration gifts

From its early start as three employees in a coffee shop to now nearly 800 employees, WebPT has transformed from scrappy startup into a full enterprise company. Over the years, some employees joined WebPT directly, while others came on-board through acquisitions.

Britney was tasked with keeping everyone engaged at a larger scale.

“We have some folks who have been with us for a long time, and some who have joined through acquisitions,” she said. “We’re entering a larger enterprise scale, but some employees prefer the small team vibe. We started asking, 'How can we provide that personal experience even as we grow?'”

As an added challenge, the past two years encouraged a work-from-home revolution. The workplace once saw Nerf gun fights, ping-pong tournaments, and dress-up days. In a remote-first workplace, WebPT needed to pivot to make employees feel celebrated in different zip codes.

Britney took the momentum from the birthday gift program and applied it to anniversaries for employees with high tenure. Each month, she sends managers a report indicating which of their team members are celebrating tenure, so they can recognize them. Even if an employee’s tenure started at a company that was acquired by WebPT, she counts those numbers and ensures everyone feels included.

Personalized gifting played an important role in showing these employees, both new and old, that even though WebPT was growing, they were still seen and valued.

#2: Reflecting company culture with employee gifts

While sending out a hand-selected birthday gift was a start, it definitely wasn’t the end. Britney started imagining how to take employee recognition to the next level by linking gifts to the company’s core values—maxims like Live Better, Be Minty, and Do Más with Menos.

“These core values have been with us since we were a team of 40,” she said. “A lot of people choose to work with WebPT because of our core values.”

So, she had a conversation with Alyce’s product leads about how she could leverage the gifting platform for internal purposes and employee engagement.

On your first day at WebPT, you get a new hire package that’s digital-first and aligned with the company’s core values. For example, a phone stand for “Do Más With Menos” and a camera cover for “Live Better” means employees can create a better WFH workspace and be off-camera on Zoom calls when it makes sense for them.

With Alyce’s ability to send meaningful gifts at scale, Britney can send customized and themed gifts to the entire team — gifts that show off the company core values, that celebrate individual employee accomplishments, and on a deeper level, make employees feel excited to be part of WebPT.

Spirit week

Leading up to WebPT’s spirit week, employees unwrapped their summer swag package to dive into a total beach theme: a towel loaded with beach puns like “Tropic Like It’s Hot,” “Shell Yeah,” and “Sailabrate”; a float for their beverage of choice; and a branded WebPT shirt that says “Seas the Day.”

“We love spirit, and we love swag,” Britney said, adding that the goal is to have spirit week once a quarter. Each day is themed differently within the week, with themes like sports fan, pajama day, fandom day, and WebPT spirit.

End-of-year gifts

Britney also sends out a company-wide gift at the end of the year, attached to a specific theme. This year’s theme was “Level Up,” featuring classic video game characters like Mario and PacMan.

The hard work starts earlier in the year. Britney chooses a theme, then designs a package based around it. A teaser gift like an ornament or keychain will go out in advance of the big reveal. Then, even closer to the holidays, each employee is given money to spend on Alyce’s marketplace. In fact, next year’s theme was just decided. “It’s a secret. But it’s awesome,” she said.

#3: Building employee engagement with the magic of the unexpected

The real impact of gifting, as Britney will tell you, comes from thoughtful gifts given at unexpected times throughout the year—multiple times each year. A branded mug on your first day and then a generic $25 gift card on your birthday?

Nah.

Think about how warm and fuzzy it feels to get a thoughtful gift in the mail. Meaningful gifting for your employees can have the same impact. It shows them they are cared for as a human being.

When a recipient receives a gift from Alyce multiple times, our research supports that their acceptance rate for future gifts is around 35% higher than the average claim rate. This means employees are open to receiving gifts at varied (and surprising!) times, and their desire to accept a future gift actually grows.

Britney uses Alyce as a way to surprise and delight employees on a personal level, too.

“I think that providing unexpected bursts of positivity within someone’s day is really my favorite thing to do,” she said.

Here are a few ways she uses Alyce to do this with her teams:

Birthdays

Before COVID prompted a move to becoming a fully remote team, birthday gifts were delivered in person at WebPT. Since going virtual, they revamped the birthday program to give employees that spark of old-school excitement: the joy of finding a gift in the mail.

Gifting with Alyce is easier than manually sending packages, Britney added, because she can select a single gift and then give employees the freedom to accept it or choose their own. Through Alyce’s Power of Choice, gift recipients have three options: the opportunity to accept their gift, exchange it, or donate their gift value to charity.

WebPT’s birthday gift program has a 76% acceptance rate and a 90% view rate.

Britney also receives positive feedback from employees via comments, with many employees expressing that they weren’t expecting the company recognition.

“It's taking the time to recognize the small things, but also finding a way to make those processes automated and personal. It may be a personal touch when you're a smaller company as you're scaling. You have to find a way to make those moments matter at that scale,” Britney said.

Sustain a Culture of Celebration With Gifting

Why does WebPT put so much priority on employee engagement? Because of one idea at the core of WebPT’s work philosophy: when employees aren’t successful, the company is not successful.

“We can have the best product on the market,” Britney said. “But if our employees are not happy or not feeling fulfilled, or don't believe in the mission, it's not going to be as successful as we want it to be.”

And, yes, sending thoughtful gifts is a big part of that. Whether it’s the birthday program or end-of-year package, WebPT gets to surprise and delight their employees when it matters most. Britney has created a culture of celebration that makes the employee experience not just a given, but a priority—and the team sees the difference.

To see how Alyce can help you build a culture of celebration for your employees, set up a personalized demo with a gifting expert today.