In this post I share my experience of bringing feedback into the company culture with the help of Kudo Cards. The early events are at least 6 years old and my memory is not as precise as I would like it to be. If there are some imprecisions, they are not on purpose :)
I received this kudo after helping a colleague who got stuck in the toilet without paper
Few years back, the company I was working for had a difficulty with people not giving feedback to each other.
The size of the company was around 30 people and almost everyone was in the same office, coming on-site to work. Still Managers would give feedback to their employees during the yearly personal discussion. Colleagues would only give feedback when shit hit the fan and people were annoyed at each other.
Sweet tooth
The HR person noticed this and tried many different techniques to get this to change and it didn’t take. I don’t remember all but one where there was a board where you could write a thank you to someone. Under it was a big bowl of candy, you could pick one per card and gift it to the person you thanked.
That was a great idea and it worked … well for a few weeks. But then the bowl of candies kept emptying and no new thank you papers were appearing on the board.
The experiments stopped and the resignation settled: we cannot bring a feedback culture in the company.
Management 3.0
Fast forward 1 year or so, and events had led the company to be half in size and most of the management changing.
I was reading the new book of Jurgen Appelo (“Managing for Happiness: Games, Tools, and Practices to Motivate Any Team”) at that moment and was looking for something applicable in my context. The topic I felt would be the most impactful now was the Kudo concept.
It took the shape of a simple “thank you” card, rewarding a behavior fitting the culture well.
Browsing online resources, I discovered that one could buy a box of 400 cardboard Kudo cards for a very affordable price from the management3.0 website. A quick check with our new HR person, and I decided to buy one box to give it a try.
To kick start it, we decided to place the box with the cards close to the kitchen.
We salvaged an old closed fruit basket box to make a recipient for the cards needing to be processed.
We created rules of good behavior to help (I remember using the fight club rules as a base for it :joy: ). We also added a simple template for those having a writer block. Finally we announced the system during a weekly all hands meeting.
Unfortunately it doesn’t really start… people won’t change their good habits for a nice looking card.
Walking the walk
So be it, me and my colleague Pekka decided to give Kudo cards to the people who championed the company values. We also added to our weekly all hands a final section before “Have a nice weekend”. We would read aloud what Kudo cards were given during the week and, only then, distribute the physical cards.
At this point something magical happened.
The people who got Kudos from us reciprocated first to us but then started giving to others too, who then did the same, building a chain reaction. Quickly we went from few, mostly written by me and Pekka, to 1/4th of the company giving kudos per week.
And it kept going.
Sure there were a few weeks where no kudos were given, especially during summer holidays, but they always came back in strength. This continued until I left the company 5 years later.
Effectively changing the culture
Over time, the company decided to reward these champions of our values. We introduced a system where once per month we would get gifts of under 20€ of value, and each person who got at least one Kudo during the month got to pick one. There didn’t really affect the rate of kudos being given, as, during covid time, no rewards were given. Meanwhile the Kudos kept flowing.
I can only interpret this as an actual culture change. People actively praising each other for a service given or a great behavior.
Newcomers entering the company took this as a fundamental part of the culture, and replicated the system. The best was when people started telling each other “I won’t give you a kudo for this, but thank you X for helping me with this”.
Later, around 2020, I started extracting the values I saw in each Kudo and made a word cloud from them. The values extracted didn’t match perfectly our company values but it happened to be an interesting tool to check whether our declared company values were a match with the ones lived by people.
Experience it yourself
I cannot guarantee that if you try it out in your company, the story will unfold similarly, but I can give you a few learned lessons that might come in handy if you want to try it yourself.
- In the current hybrid work, use kudobox.co (or similar) for giving kudos to each other.
- Add a reminder in your communication tool to call for people’s kudos. Many of us are stuck head in the wheel working and we need to be reminded to take the time to reflect. I was usually giving a reminder 1 day before the all hands meeting.
- When launching such a system, you have to kickstart it yourself (and get innovators to aggressively use the system at the start).
- Make the kudos public and celebrate both the giver and the recipient.
- Try to focus on kudos rewarding behavior rather than output or outcome. It can be really hard especially if there are no other system to celebrate people doing their job well, but what you want is to create a feedback culture not praising people for doing their work.
- If you introduce a reward system, keep it small and unexpected. This is, as Jurgen Appelo explains, because we want to trigger an intrinsic reward reaction rather than expect the reward as a payment. Also, in Finland, it’s considered an “advantage in nature” if over a certain value, so it is taxable.
- Some ideas that had worked as Kudo rewards: Chocolate, Coffee, movie tickets, PS store cards (and similar but cannot be a general store card in Finland)
This is already longer that I thought it would be, so if you want to dig more into the subject, feel free to DM me on Linked in.