Celebrating effort alone goes directly against the Netflix and other ROE philosophies.

I've seen both play out many times in real life and personally I prefer sticking to celebrating results. Why celebrate hard work just for the sake of work? shudder

One of my best managers always said "the only thing you can judge are results". Everything else is talk.

> Why celebrate hard work just for the sake of work?

Why do hard work at all? My answer would be to risk building something great. I doubt anyone wants to do hard work for the sake of it. Building a culture that rewards honest effort would encourage the same hard work in the future despite risks of failure -- though admittedly it's easy to go overboard in either direction! Use your best judgement here.

Having experienced working at a company where appearence of effort was rewarded over effort and results: It was terrible. I suggest dumping celebrations and simply reward results first, effort second, and be skeptical of all appearances.

Author here. In an attempt at being pithy, this might have been worded poorly. My experience is that rewarding success is the standard approach in most industries, but teams that become accustomed to only being rewarded when they succeed can develop an aversion to failure (and therefore taking risks).

I realize it might also be easy to extrapolate this out to always rewarding a team, no matter what, and I don't want to suggest that in all circumstances... you know if your team put forth an honest effort and should be rewarded despite building something that fails. Definitely don't mean for this to be a hard and fast rule, but more of a tip for encouraging a smart, hard-working team to feel safer taking risks.