TLDR: Having a remote team can be difficult to build that sense of belonging since it’s not easy to just turn around and pat someone on the back for their work. Yet, we’ve put in an interesting spin on employee (or as we call it kudos-ee) of the month
For a lot of my time growing up I was sooo intently focused on fixing what didn’t go right, so much so I sometimes forget that there are A LOT of things going RIGHT…
This focus on improving was compounded many times when I was a management consultant and Internal auditor in my previous career (not to mention the huge amount of personal development books, seminars and courses I was taking).
This was a behaviour I was also noticing in my own remote team. Everyone was doing a bang up job, yet no one was receiving (openly anyway) credit or much else for their work. Most of all there was no CELEBRATING going on when we won deals, over-delivered for our clients or even if someone went above and beyond the call of duty.
So after discussing it with the management team I went ahead and scoured the slack apps to find the simplest and best way (also known as look for free apps) to recognise & reward team members. Not only do we want to recognise the team, but we wanted to make it fun. We wanted to do a kind of employee of the month, but make it a little more transparent and to allow not just the management to decide who should win it!
But what do you put on offer for those that win it (even though you might be a little cash tight and having people across 5 countries? I even put it out there for the team to throw in ideas and we weren’t getting much. So we just decided what our ceiling was in terms of cash value.
So when it came to implementing the above, it’s not easy…
The tool we ended up using at the time was Growbot* (now known as Disco) which would tally up the number of “kudos’s” for each person. The award became known as the Kudos’ee of the Month and when we first launched it the winner was none other than…
What compounded the laughs here was that I was also the one announcing the winner, so it got a lot of heat at our Monthly Townhall Meetings… -_-
I didn’t see what the issue was, but as any great leader would do I honourably stepped down and passed the Kudos’ee award to our graphic designer from Serbia. (I might do a post about why I gave this one up actually because there’s an important reason why I did this…)
What transpired next must have been some of the funniest and most unexpected chatter afterwards when we were discussing what he wanted for winning that month. At first he was looking for a travel voucher to fund his Austrian trip. Only for him to throw this one at me from left field…
If you don’t know Steam is probably the largest platform where you can buy PC games digitally.
Anyway, long story short he got his just reward and even mentioned this message to me about how motivating it is to have something like this ‘Kudos-ee of the Month’
Recognition, Reward, and Celebration can be cultivated in your remote team with the right things put in place. For us, even though we still give out vouchers to a cash value, the rule we’ve made is that it cannot be money paid. It must be something that the person really wants to have that is more than just $$$.
Life is more than just the amount in the bank, but to our team a lot of it is about the experiences we have and embrace and that’s what I want these rewards to be able. Creating memorable experiences and here are a few of the rewards our team have given themselves…
Note *: After Growbot evolved into Disco and became a paid model our team eventually switched over to Praisely now, which isn’t as good but does the same function.