At Google, employees can give each other “peer bonuses” to recognize each other for doing outstanding work. All you have to do is open an internal website, type why the other person deserves recognition, and their manager will approve it. Then, Googlers reply to a big email chain congratulating the recipient on their award. Also, the recipient earns an extra $175¹. Pretty cool, huh?

It feels great to to receive a peer bonus. And, it feels great to acknowledge someone who went above and beyond. Usually, people give peer bonuses for fixing hard bugs, heroically resolving outages, or after completion of a big project. So, I was pleasantly surprised to open my inbox one day and find my strangest peer bonus yet.

The Story

About a year before I got this unusual peer bonus, a central infrastructure team reached out to me. My team uses their tools, and they wanted to make their tools better. They set up a monthly meeting with me with a very vague purpose and no agenda.

Here’s how these initial meetings went.

First, I would ask for something. Then, they would describe why it couldn’t be done, or mention that they have other things going on and won’t work on it. Meanwhile, some of the engineers on their side loved to show off their knowledge without actually solving any problems.

“If you don’t have time to do anything, why are you asking me for feature requests?” I thought to myself.

After yet another useless meeting, I decided to change things. I created an agenda with three items:

• Wins
• Updates
• Requests

In the Wins section, I put some positive things that happened in the last month thanks to the central infrastructure team’s tools. The meeting had devolved into too much complaining, So I thought we would start off on a positive note. And to be fair, the tools are useful–but when you ask “what could be improved?” people will concentrate on the tool’s shortcomings.

Next, I added an updates section. This is where we could provide updates on tasks from previous meetings. For example, if there was a project that was going to take 6 months, we could report progress, blockers, or ask questions about the project each month.

Finally, I designated a requests section. This is where we could provide feature requests to the central infrastructure team. What’s the motivation? Are there any alternatives available? Will a different feature make this problem obsolete soon? The best requests would get an official ticket.

With the feature requests tracked in tickets, I could then check on their state. If a future request was implemented, I could add that ticket to the Wins section for next time. We created a virtuous flywheel that kept spinning.

The Strangest Peer Bonus Yet

So that brings me back to the peer bonus. Months after implementing the new meeting agenda, the central infrastructure team found our meetings to be much more useful, especially compared to all the other clients they meet with.

So what was the peer bonus? It was “For being unfailingly positive and thanking people for the work that they’ve done” in our monthly meetings. It was certainly different than launching a feature or responding to an outage. I was quietly proud that I could change the way our teams worked together.

1. $175 USD in 2023. The value has gone up over time. ↩︎