After writing about our Spotify playlists, Tazzie Awards, birthday cards, surveys and Appreciation Days, a pattern emerged for me: team traditions aren’t universal. What was a hit on one team didn’t necessarily work on another team. (Birthday surveys, I’m looking at you.) When designing your own team traditions, you need to take into account, well, YOUR team.

Team Characteristics Matter #

Every team has certain characteristics, and some of those really matter when planning your own team traditions.

• Is the team, in general, outgoing or reserved?
• Playful or serious?
• Writing-comfortable or writing-averse?
• Long-tenured vs newly formed or mixed-tenure?
• High-trust vs low-trust?
• Culturally homogeneous or global?
• Overloaded or has a little free time to spare?
• Async-friendly or more synchronous by default?

Traditions work best when they’re aligned with your team’s culture. That’s why personalized playlists worked for the playful, high-trust, close-knit, long-tenured Taz team, but why I never would have attempted it on the reserved, global, mixed-tenure Access team. If you’re not sure what would work for your team, ask them! Send a short survey with a few options and let them vote. Getting buy-in can result in greater support.

When traditions fail, people often internalize it as “my team doesn’t care,” when the real issue is misfit, not apathy.

Principles for Designing Good Team Traditions #

As I reflected on team traditions, I came up with several principles to creating good traditions.

• Fit the tradition to the communication style. How does your team naturally connect? Writing? Jokes? Storytelling? If your team writes long Teams messages to each other, traditions that involve writing could be a good fit. If they prefer calls over writing, then pick a tradition that can be done during standup.
• Protect psychological safety. A tradition should never put someone at risk of embarrassment, comparison or exclusion. Allow anonymity, make participation for both the celebrant and the teammates optional, control the visibility of the results, and make sure you trust your team to be kind, not sarcastic. If you can’t trust certain teammates to be kind to others, choose something different, or make sure you can edit the responses before sharing with the celebrant.
• Design for inclusivity, not popularity. If your team is likely only to participate when the celebrant is popular on the team, then pick a tradition that will result in more equal results, or make sure the results are only fully visible to the celebrant.
• Keep effort proportional to team bandwidth. If your team is always slammed by deadlines, you are unlikely to have as much participation in time-intensive traditions. They’re not just activities; they’re commitments. Pick ones people have energy for.
• Build predictability and cadence - and don’t ever forget anyone! Make sure every person gets celebrated on their special day, and start your traditions at the beginning of the year so nobody gets left out.
• Let people express themselves in their own ways. Some people write heartfelt messages. Some contribute memes. Some don’t participate. The best traditions allow for different ways of expression.
• Ensure your tradition can scale with turnover and growth. Choose rituals that can survive team changes, onboarding, and mixed-tenure, unless your company does not hire frequently. You never know if your next hire’s birthday is going to be the day after they start!
• Make it sustainable, for you and the team. You never want to be in a position where some teammates got recognized and others don’t because you burned out and couldn’t continue it.

If you’re looking for concrete ideas to apply these principles, I’ve put together a list of birthday and work-anniversary traditions designed to work across different team types — playful or reserved, synchronous or async, high-trust or still forming.

You can find the full list here.

Why Team Traditions Matter #

Team traditions aren’t just fluff.

Here’s what I consistently saw them do on Taz:

• They helped teammates feel like they belonged, even though some of us had never met in person before and lived on the other side of the world.
• They gave us visibility into who people were as individuals, not just as job titles or Jira tickets.
• They created moments where everyone (who opted in) got to be seen and appreciated.
• They gave us the chance to recognize people for who they were, not just what they produced.
• They created small but meaningful moments of connection, something remote teams don’t get by default.

We were still a software development team. Our work lives still revolved around Jira tickets and production issues. But work felt more human, more personal, because of our traditions. And over time, that made a real difference in how it felt to be on the team - and made us proud to be on our team.

Why Companies Should Support Team Traditions #

From a company perspective, team traditions shouldn’t be seen as a waste of time.

When done well, they tend to create:

• Lower turnover, driven by a stronger sense of belonging
• Higher morale and resilience during stressful periods, especially due to increased support from teammates
• Stronger team cohesion and shared identity
• More trust, which quietly fuels velocity
• More psychological safety, which reduces interpersonal conflict
• Increased engagement, because people feel seen and valued

None of these outcomes are guaranteed, and traditions alone won’t fix a broken culture. But the absence of connection almost always creates drag, especially on distributed teams.

Supporting team traditions doesn’t require a budget or formal program. None of my traditions cost any money. All I needed was permission from my manager to invest some time and space in our team.

One Last Thing #

One final note here. I’ve said it before, and it’s worth repeating: You don’t have to be the manager to start team traditions. Most software developers don’t start cultural change on their teams. It may not have crossed their minds, it may not be one of their strengths, or it may just not be part of their job description. But teams need emotional glue, and someone needs to step in and fill that role. That’s what I did. All you need is care for your team and enough bandwidth to make them work.