What are the surface level indicators of a thriving company? Pretend you have no access to growth rates, financial statements, TechCrunch articles, or product demos.

Just imagine you walked into an office one day and started observing.

Would it be a certain audible buzz? Catered lunches? Flowing kombucha? A wide variety of snacks? Weekly happy hours?

It could be that. But what really defines culture and keeps morale high, at least at the team level as a manager? Often, it’s not the perks. It’s the pace. The attitude. The care you provide to your team. And quite often some of the best ways to promote culture and cement it are basically free. Gestures, appreciation, caring personally, checking in. Not happy hours or more upside incentive.

One might even put forth the theory that the amount of happy hours are inversely correlated to the health of a business. Quite literally, they are a drag on the bottom line from an expense perspective. And they can be a magic trick deployed to distract from what’s really bubbling underneath the surface.

As you go about building your team, there are some (mostly) free giveaways you can take advantage of to build your culture and help maintain morale:

• Appreciation Notes – are you calling out the wins in writing and saying thank you for jobs well done? Please do not copy and paste the same one to everyone on the team. They will know, promise.
• Career growth Planning – are you identifying areas of interest and helping your team grow?
• Personal Check Ins – do you know about their lives? Stresses and milestones?
• Personal Check In Follow Ups – how are they working through those stresses and celebrating those milestones?
• Non Financial Spiffs – i.e. Summer Friday for a job well done – give out some surprises. Variety is the spice of life.

The best things in life are free, right? Showing appreciation can be a tool of yours for building lasting culture. And elsewhere, the happy hours will continue until morale improves. Drink up!