When I joined Ancestry.com, we were a small start-up of a few hundred employees in some cramped offices behind the post office in Orem, Utah. Now almost 15 years later, we’re an international organization of more than 1,400 employees with offices around the world. Yet despite our growth, Ancestry.com has continued to provide employees with a close knit work environment that makes you feel like you’re part of a family and not just another employee.
One way Ancestry.com shows it’s appreciation for all of our hard work is with a monthly morale budget, which our front-end development (FED) team has used to do some pretty interesting team building activities over the years. We started off just going to lunch together as a team, then slowly branched out to the occasional movie. Over time, we’ve started pushing the envelope and found some pretty interesting ways to spend our monthly morale budget.
Some of our more memorable morale activities have included indoor rock climbing, frisbee golf, Nickelcade, family BBQ, bowling, and even archery. Simply doing these activities eventually wasn’t enough, so our intern now doubles as our audio/video specialist and documents all the fun we’re having: