01.

Greenhouse had a very lively culture, built on strong values that were represented in its teammates and even built into its hiring processes. The People Team wanted a way to recognize employees who embodied its core values without it turning into a top-down HR program nobody used.

02.

The company was at a growth point and had added xx% of employees over the past year, prompting a full office move on 5th Avenue in NYC. The traditional, usual ways of how Greenhouse recognized employees needed to change, but the company did not want to create a program that did not feel authentic to its “small startup” culture.

03.

The idea started with the name itself: Greenhouse helps companies grow, and gnomes are the characters that live in a garden, giving it personality. I partnered with a designer on the team to find a 3D printer, build the CAD files, and print a set of “culture gnomes”, one for each value, each in its own color and name. Print minimums meant we could only get a handful per value, so we hand-painted them ourselves in Greenhouse's brand colors to keep costs low. That's production logistics that most creatives would rather hand, but the idea only worked if the object itself felt the opposite of a stock trophy pulled from a catalog. How it worked: get a gnome, silently place it on someone else's desk to "nominate" them based on the gnome’s value. Have it on your desk for a while until you secretly place it on someone else’s when you see them displaying that value. The mechanic worked extremely well, with constant movement of the gnomes across 2 floors of the org. It was so successful that the People Team decided to use the award system as the “end of year” culture awards, calling them “The Golden Gnomies.”