Why We Celebrate
There are moments at work that have nothing to do with deadlines or deliverables, and somehow those are the ones that stay with you the longest.
This week was one of those moments.
Jess shared with the team that she’s expecting her first child: a little boy. And yes, there were genuine happy tears. The kind you don’t try to hide because no one in the room wants you to. In fact, we couldn’t be more excited for her if we tried. It wasn’t a “that’s amazing, congrats!” and then back to business kind of announcement. It stopped the day in the best possible way. We sat in it. We celebrated it. We felt it.
And honestly, that’s the point.
Celebrating professional wins matters. You know, landing a client, launching a campaign, hitting milestones…those moments deserve recognition. But celebrating personal wins? The ones that shape someone’s entire life? That’s where strong company culture lives. That’s where a team stops feeling like a group of coworkers and starts feeling like people who have each other’s backs.
And while this all feels intuitive, there’s research behind it. Gallup found that employees who feel cared for by team members are more than twice as likely to be engaged at work, and companies with highly engaged co-workers see lower turnover and higher profitability. Harvard Business Review published similar findings, noting that workplaces built on genuine relationships and psychological safety outperform those that focus solely on performance metrics. Even Google’s well-known Project Aristotle showed the highest-performing teams weren’t the ones stacked with the most talent, but the ones where people felt supported and valued as humans first.
When you celebrate someone’s life outside of work, you’re saying: we see you. Not just the part that logs on, shows up to meetings, or delivers great work, but the part that’s growing, changing, becoming something new. That kind of care doesn’t disappear at 5 p.m. It carries into how people collaborate, how they support one another during hard seasons, and how they step up when someone else needs a little extra grace.
I really believe this mindset extends far beyond the office. If everyone took better care of their coworkers, their neighbors, their families, their friends, the world would feel different. Lighter. Kinder. More human. Culture isn’t built through perfectly worded values on a website. It’s built in shared joy and tears. So yes, we’re still doing the work, but we’re also celebrating a new chapter for someone we care deeply about, and if that means the day slows down for a moment while we soak it all in, well, that feels like just the right pace.
