Sophie is leaving after 8 years. 34 colleagues. A group card signed in 3 minutes in the kitchen. A bottle of champagne. Two weeks later, no one really remembers what was said.

The leaving do is one of the most botched rituals of working life. There you are, standing with a plastic cup, trying to find something sincere to say in a room that's far too noisy, to someone you may never see again. The speech lasts five minutes. People laugh a little too loudly. And then you go home with the vague sense that you missed the moment.

And yet almost everyone meant well. It's just that the format leaves no room for what really matters.

What we usually try.

When someone leaves, the team always tries something. Usually it's a WhatsApp group set up four days before the do. You add everyone — except you don't have two people's numbers, and you've added the intern by mistake. The group is called “Sophie's Gift 🎁”. The messages pile up at 11pm — “is 10€ a head okay?”, “who's sorting the card?”, “I'll be away next week”. Someone suggests making a photo book. Good idea. No one sends their photos.

On the day itself, there's the card signed by fifteen people in two minutes before the speech. There's the envelope. There may be a note read aloud by someone who hadn't planned to speak and is improvising. Sophie smiles. It's nice. And in two weeks, no one remembers exactly what was said.

It's not a question of willingness. It's a question of format — in the workplace, there simply isn't a tool designed to gather what people really have to say to someone who's leaving.

What we'd have liked to say.

Thomas is head of HR at a company of 80 people. When their managing director announced she was leaving after 12 years, he wanted to do something different. Not a plaque. Not an envelope. Something she could keep.

He created a memory space, shared the link with the team, and asked everyone to leave whatever they wanted — a message, a voice recording, a video, a photo. 41 contributions in two weeks. People who never write recorded three-minute messages. A former intern dug out a photo of their first meeting. A member of the technical team, famous for never speaking up in meetings, recorded a five-minute piece telling exactly what she had taught him.

Why the voice changes everything.

Most people don't find it easy to write a heartfelt message. Writing demands that you stage the emotion. You have to choose the words, reread, worry about doing too much or too little. The result: you write two generic lines, or nothing at all.

The voice slips beneath those defences. You press record, you talk, and out come things you'd never have put in writing. The colleague who never says a word in meetings — give him a recording and he opens up. The person intimidated by writing — she speaks naturally, with hesitations, with silences, exactly what makes words ring true.

Video is something else again. The slightly awkward face of someone searching for their words. The smile at the corner of the mouth. The way they look into the camera. You don't forget that.

What Sophie will do in ten years.

In ten years, Sophie will be somewhere else. Her phone will have changed three times over. The link to the memory space may be lost in an old inbox. Will she easily find those 41 messages again?

That's why Thomas had also ordered a book. The messages laid out, the audio transcribed, stills from the videos, the photos. A bound book, 52 pages, handed to her on the day of the do. Something you set on a shelf. That you come across in a box when you move house. That asks for no battery, no password, no connection.

Memory needs matter.