(this post is a feed post from my comments on reddit)
r/Entrepreneur
when did this previously we budgeted annual as a % of total staff cost, so we’d do something like allocate 5% of the staff cost for team building, then my HR team would figure our what the team wanted to do with that over the span of a year.
first why 5% – thats was subjective based on what we felt would be reasonable overhead on the HC cost.
next passing it to HR as an annual budget gave them responsibility and empowered them to take that project and run with it, it gave them the chance to be more than hiring recruiters or admin dealing with ppls salary, onboarding and laptops – it was a fun part of their role that made them feel they had control and influence over the company culture, we measured this based on employee turn over and a staff survey which became a KPI for HR, reduce turn over, increase happiness.
lastly, we pushed that HR should get ambassadors from each team that could represent a pastoral/ community/culture ‘leadership’ within our business so again every team and every person felt they could have a say on how the budget was spend to build culture.
the CEO and myself (COO) deliberately stayed out of it, aside from setting the annual budget and ruling out truly idiotic stuff (they wanted to rent a cruise ship one year and go wayyy over budget) – we just left it to the teams to deal with an organise. i’d occasionally make suggestions to improve the team building aspect of how they made decisions, for example they were trying to think of where to go for a team building – so i suggested that ppl with different ideas should to a PPT and pitch it to the company (training on sales!) and basically had a mini-pitch day where ppl presented their destination and the staff all voted where they wanted to go… the mini-pitch day in of itself was a team building activity.
bonuses was separate from all this as it was based on the financial model, and clear targets – sales would also get commission – basically our model would have estimates based on previous years on what the year would look like, this was the base target, the model meant that there were proportional targets for all teams (including HR) off of which we set the targets, we then applied deviation from this to set targets and bonuses based on increase over the base line, using unit economics in the Fin model to determine the bonus amounts in proportion.