In the era of remote work, we wanted to increase the interaction between colleagues. The introduction of the Kudos system turned out to be an ideal solution. How does the system work in our company?

Let’s start by explaining the word KUDOS. According to the Oxford Dictionary, “KUDOS” is a Greek word that means praise received for any achievement. Each employee of our company has the opportunity to say thank you for a good job, for help, kindness or simply to say thank you for improving your mood 🙂

Rules for granting Kudos

The concept of the KUDOS system is based on a few very simple principles:

1. KUDOS are public. Everyone has access to them and it is known who was awarded and for what, only the author of the praise remains a secret.
2. KUDOS can be awarded without any quantitative restrictions.
3. KUDOS are always a surprise, no one ever knows when he will be awarded.
4. KUDOS can be awarded to anyone, it does not matter what is your position.
5. KUDOS can be awarded for absolutely everything — it depends on the rewarder.

Our game of granting Kudos

We were inspired by the popular concept of Kudo Box & Kudo Cards and decided to adapt it to our needs so that the rules were clear and the system was simple and quick to use. In many companies, KUDOS are awarded in a traditional paper form and then thrown into a designated box. As a Software House with the motto: Bringing innovation to life as a team, we have created our platform for awarding Kudos.

How does it work? To award a Kudos, all you need to do is complete a short form, where you have to select the e-mail address of the awarded person from the employee list and provide the reason why this person is awarded. There are three types of thanks you can choose from:

1. THANK YOU!
2. GOOD JOB!!
3. IMPRESSIVE!!!

The person awarded with Kudos receives an e-mail notification with a thank you note.

Additionally, every week we print a list of Kudos awarded last week and post it on the board in the center of our office. Besides, we are working on creating an ONLINE Kudos board that will be a perfect reflection of a stationary board. And all this so that in the era of COVID-19, our remote employees can take full advantage of the Kudos system, which motivates us to be even more involved every day.

Assumptions and effects of the KUDOS system

We wanted both the principles and assumptions of the Kudos system to be clear. Therefore, Kudos is:

• nice gesture that can improve even the worst day
• the opportunity to reward an idea and good intentions, not just the result
• a great way to thank your team for a good meeting or for completing the next phase of a project

Besides, you can also get Kudos for the positive attitude you give to others.

Exactly one month has passed since we introduced the system to our company. Of course, we took into account that the system might not be accepted or might be taken as a joke. Despite our concerns, it turned out that the system is very popular among our employees. The effects of the system are already visible — employees give each other a few Kudos per week. Because we are not such a large company, there are many Kudos, so we can say that the introduced system is a bull’s eye, and we do not see any disadvantages of the system yet.

To motivate our employees to give each other even more Kudos, we decided to introduce symbolic awards. People who received the greatest amount of Kudos in the last month will be awarded.

So it looks like this:

1. THANK YOU! — photo on the board with KUDOS
2. GOOD JOB! — a randomly selected book from the resources of our Library
3. IMPRESSIVE! — VOUCHER, e.g. for cinema, Empik, Home & You, etc.

An additional distinction is the points in our other internal system — the EVALUATION system, but we will write about it another time …

SOURCES:

https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/kudos

https://management30.com/practice/kudo-cards/