Customer story • 8 min read
Reddit is home to thousands of communities, endless conversation, and authentic human connection. Whether it's breaking news, niche hobbies, or a never-ending stream of the internet's cutest animals, there is a community on Reddit for everybody. Behind the platform is a team committed to values of shared interest and trust.
3,000+
Distributed / Global (SF, NY, Chicago, etc.)
Social Media / Technology
For Michelle Lozzi, Reddit’s Lead of Experience, the goal has always been to ensure the internal culture mirrors the external product: organic, community-led, and deeply engaging.
However, scaling from a 175-person team in a single location to a global workforce of thousands fundamentally shifted how employees connected. With a distributed workforce and an explosion of internal events, Reddit’s organic "hallway conversations" and spontaneous table-side chats morphed into disconnected digital interactions. Reddit now needed a way to operationalize its culture without it beginning to feel "corporate" or "unnative".
As Reddit grew, the Experience team faced a visibility crisis. There were incredible events happening in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, along with virtual ERG meetups, but employees lacked a central way to discover them without needing an invitation.
Michelle needed a solution that solved the logistical hurdles of a hybrid workforce but refused to compromise on Reddit's brand identity. Many tools on the market forced employees into rigid, third-party interfaces that felt disconnected from the Reddit ethos.
I didn't love the idea of sending people to another function or feature or tool that felt unnative to what we create at Reddit...I wanted it to look like us and feel like us.
Michelle Lozzi
Michelle explains why Epoch was the clear front-runner over other software: the ability to create a seamless, branded experience that felt authentic to their employees.
Reddit partnered with Epoch to create a centralized hub for all internal experiences, becoming the digital, always-on version of the analog community bulletin board.
By using Epoch, Reddit enabled:
Michelle provides a perfect analogy for what Epoch achieves for a distributed workforce—a persistent, always-available space to see what the village is doing.
Reddit’s Experience team goes beyond "perks." They use Epoch to drive hard business data. Michelle views her role as an "art," but uses Epoch to provide the "science."
By tracking attendance data through Epoch, the team can map engagement against performance metrics. They found a direct correlation: Top performers at Reddit are highly engaged with internal events. Conversely, a lack of engagement (low RSVP rates) can serve as an early warning sign for retention risks or low performance.
Furthermore, they use events to build product empathy. By bringing clients, moderators, and users into employee events, they help sales teams build better relationships and engineering teams develop deeper empathy for the people using the platform.
Powerful insight on how Reddit uses Epoch data to track the correlation between event participation and employee performance/retention.
With a 96.2% activation rate, Reddit continues to successfully operationalize "belonging". Looking ahead, Michelle and her team are focused on continuing to blend the lines between internal and external community—bringing clients, mods, and users closer to the employee experience to drive empathy and pride.
Senior Director of Experience at Reddit
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