How LINE Prepares for the New Year’s Eve Rush: Employee Care Team

Helping our developers on one of the toughest nights of the year

Jan 11, 2021

One of the biggest nights of the year is without a doubt New Year’s Eve, as friends and families gather to count down the minutes and seconds until the old year is over and a new one begins.

Here at LINE, however, all that holiday joy means a huge surge in traffic, and that’s something that has to be managed carefully. The moment the clock strikes midnight and December 31 turns into the first of January, everyone sends out a flurry of messages. Let’s take a look at how the Employee Care Team helps our developers ensure everything on LINE continues running smoothly at the big moment.

Preparing for the New Year

At 6 p.m. on Dec. 31, 2020, with just a few hours to go until the New Year, at the LINE office, the Employee Care (EC) Team is busy preparing nutritious dinner boxes, light refreshments, and gift bags for those developers who came to the office to prepare for the New Year’s traffic surge. But this year was a bit different from most, because of the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and many of our developers were working from home.

For those developers working remotely, the EC Team had refreshments and gift bags delivered to their homes. Notably, the LINE Developer Relations Team prepared beautiful and colorful gift bags for those developers who had to work overnight. Those bags contained a variety of vitamins as well as health juices and eye warmers, along with LINE DEV merchandise and thank-you notes!

Refreshments and gift bags were delivered to developers working from home while preparing for the New Year’s day traffic surge
  • Watch the video “[Best wishes for a happy start] Behind the scenes: The New Year’s Greetings” [Click here]


Best wishes for a happy start with Employee Care!

Q. What is “Best wishes for a happy start?”

A. “Best wishes for a happy start” is the last service that the EC Team provides at the end of each year on December 31. We provide warm meals for the developers who work on the last night of December to prepare for the LINE messenger’s traffic surge at midnight on New Year’s Eve. It is a care service that we provide in order to comfort our developers for not being able to spend New Year’s Eve with their loved ones, featuring small gifts that they can later share with their families. We named the service “Best wishes for a happy start” to show our hope that the New Year begins smoothly and the traffic surge doesn’t cause any troubles.

Refreshments, gift bags, and meal boxes prepared for the developers who came to the office to prepare for the New Year’s traffic surge on Dec. 31, 2020

Q. What is the most important part of preparing for this event?

A. Up until last year, the most important thing was to help the developers feel warm and comfortable even though they were stuck in the office, so we paid extra attention to keeping the food warm when we prepared the meal boxes. This year, however, most of the developers were working from home, so instead we carefully selected some refreshments and things that the developers could share with their families. We also reviewed the delivery schedule and process very thoroughly to make sure the refreshments and gift bags arrived at their home in time.

Q. You have been hosting this event for the New Year’s Day Traffic Response task force every year. Any memorable stories?

A. One of the most memorable New Year’s Eves happened at the end of 2016. Like in previous years, I had to prepare the meal boxes and refreshments in the office, so I listened to the New Year’s Eve countdown bell with my team members. To celebrate the New Year, we cooked rice cake soup with the ingredients that we had prepared, and delivered the soup to the developers who were in the office. I still cannot forget how delicious that rice cake soup was.

The start of a new year with warmth and care

Thanks to the support provided by the LINE Employee Care Team and the Developer Relations Team, our developers who worked through the night were able to work with full bellies and hearts! 

To hear about LINE’s New Year’s Eve preparations from a developer’s point of view, check out our second story. [Click here]

 

 

 

※ Please note that the details described in this article may not apply to all offices.