Thanks, congratulations, fantastic! ... how do you feel about these words?
"Kudo Cards" was the first Management 3.0 practice I had the courage to propose and implement with my teammates in my current organization (more info about it on the official M30 site). And yes, I wrote the word courage because for us this was indeed something completely new and at some point, disruptive.
At that moment, I chose this practice mainly because of the following reasons:
- We needed a tool to offer instant positive feedback between our team members.
- It was (in my mind) the easiest one to implement, but later we faced some challenges and important lessons that I want to share with all of you.
The idea was simple: If you felt that someone helped you, if you wanted to recognize someone's work, or if you just wanted to show appreciation for someone, pick a Kudo card, write whatever you want, and post it in our Kudos' wall, so everyone can see it. And that's exactly how we started this. We communicated the idea to our 8 teams (around 60 people at that moment), printed some cards and that's it, everything was ready for us!
The first days, the wall was practically empty, with just a few cards, so after brainstorming some ideas, we decided to start giving the "winners" a prize by the end of the month as we wanted everyone to be as excited as we were about this! So basically, if you received a Kudo Card this month, you would receive a snack, as simple as that.
We gave the snacks to the "winners" once the month was closed, so it was a surprise for everyone as we did not inform people upfront about this.
In the following weeks, people started posting more Kudo Cards and jokes soon followed, things like "you are giving him/her that Kudo just for the snack!". Everything was happening as expected, but for some reason, I was not completely satisfied with how we were doing it.
- What was the team obtaining from "winning" a prize because they received a card saying thank you or great job!
- Why did we think that the gesture or that instant feedback from a colleague was not enough, and we were giving snacks every month?
- Intrinsic motivation was very important for us, was this aligned with that?
While all these thoughts were going on in mind, the COVID-19 arrived.
The first weeks we didn't even think about how to handle Kudo Cards while we were working remotely. The Kudo wall was left in the office and we had other things to solve and accommodate first.
One day, I remembered about the kudos thing, so we created the "kudos" channel in our Slack space with the link to a site to easily create kudos: https://kudobox.co. Of course, we were not going to give any extra prize, but at least we had a space for the people who wanted to recognize someone else’s work in public.
I was pleasantly surprised when people started again to give recognition to others. And even better, others reacted to these kudos with the Slack emoji reactions!
If I need to implement this practice again in the future
- First of all, I will definitely explain its purpose to everyone. the "why" and the "what for", and not just to the people who are around the Kudo wall while we are preparing it. In the experience shared in this article, I assumed that everyone was going to understand why we were doing this, but in fact, most of the people didn't know the dynamic, and sometimes it's better to take some minutes to talk about it and see if anyone has question or suggestions, instead of just start using it without any instance of communication.
- If I implement this practice with a team working in the same location, I would like to try the "Kudo box". The idea that the cards can be placed in a box, to then empty it so the workers can celebrate those who had received a card is fantastic (more info in the M 3.0 site).
- The Slack solution worked great for us. That's why if I have the chance to work with people distributed in different locations I will like to try a virtual solution again. It could be a Slack channel or any other virtual solution that helps to share kudos.
An important lesson learned
Personally, the most important thing I learned from the Kudo Cards practice is that recognition is very powerful by itself, it can make important changes in people triggering intrinsic motivation. But of course, it's important that you as a facilitator explain that to people. This is something that I later implemented in practices like the Moving Motivators or the 12 Steps to Happiness, take some minutes to explain what the practice is for.
And you, are you ready to start thanking your colleagues?
For more info about Kudo Cards, please visit the official Management 3.0 website