Kudos for Free
In this article, I want to tell you about one practice that we did in a team and probably most people will raise an eyebrow when being asked to do it.
That is the Kudos Time, Kudos Box, Thank You Notes, or whatever name you want it to be.
Regardless of the name, just simply make some time to do it every end of your working cycle (maybe a week, two weeks or a month it is fine), and it will be one of the most rewarding things you will do for your team.
What is a Kudos?
The word kudos comes from Greek and it means praise or renown.
“He received a lot of kudos for his book”
However, in the sense we are going to use it, it is a praise I do to one person for helping me on something (that is also why you can search for this activity also as Thank You Notes). The idea is to make it about the team, not about one person doing great work on their own.
How Did We Do It?
The team had retrospectives every four weeks and as part of every session we had reserved a space called Thank You Notes. It took around 10 minutes to finish (it should be very quick, not overly-explaining things or how we feel).
For our first time, the instructions were:
- Grab a post it note and write down who do you want to thank for helping you on something.
- Post it on the wall.
- Once everyone finishes, we take turns to explain a little about why or what was done.
- I as lead did it too.
In total took around 10 minutes, and it left a good atmosphere in the room. It is more difficult for some people to do it than to others, but in general everyone participated and it was a good exercise.
We continued doing it on the next retrospectives and some things started happening which needed correction.
- Initially I, as lead, participated as well but then I felt it might not be good for the team as it may be misinterpreted as me having “favorites”. So I stopped that, and only did a general thank you summarizing what was done in that cycle.
- Sometimes, a team has the “Thank you all” person, that will write a post it for every person in the team. It is fun and gratifying to watch, yet it diminishes its “value”. So we put a rule of “One thank you for one person only”. This made it focused on the person who helped you the most.
- Sometimes people would just write the TO (recipient), so I forced them to also write the FROM (writer), this way you would see the post it with From and To, and know at least a little context on it (this is fixed with the printed cards described later).
- At first, I accumulated the post its on the wall and made a math (about how many each person got), but then I think it was better for each person have his own thank-you’s on their own seat. It is a nice reminder of what one did.
- There was a point where some people would not receive a note for quite a while. Demotivating, right?. Well in this case it is needed that you frame the mind of that person, not in “why people do not appreciate my work”, but in “how can I make my work more appreciated by others”. Eventually things leveled in, all persons in the team received notes which makes it even more gratifying to see.
What Did We Get?
TRUST and COLLABORATION. Knowing that another person appreciates what you did, it is very motivating and encouraging. It makes you realize that your job is touching other people in a good way. And definitely results in constant reciprocation which is the basis for true collaboration.
Indeed, I was lucky to have a team to be willing to do this and try it.
There is also a byproduct as well. This activity also reinforces the intrinsic motivators instead of the extrinsic ones (like awards from management or bonuses). You are allowing your team to learn how to harness this, and get used to this “intrinsic insertion of energy”.
You are also improving a team’s performance and collaboration with zero cost.
Something to think about, don’t you think?.
How Can We Improve It?
- If you don't have a retrospective session where you discuss how you did and how can you improve, then you should create one and make it part of your group routine. Regardless of Scrum, Agile, or whatever, every team or department or group of people working together need to open a space for analyzing how they did and how they want to do (problems, solutions, plans). It is part of a constant-learning approach which I don't think anyone will reject that, right?.
- Thank You Notes are natural to be done in a retrospective session, because is part of reinforcing the good things we did in this period, especially those that are “behind the scenes” and do not show up in metrics, reports, etc.
- Instead of using post its, you can download these Kudo Cards (from Management3.0 website) and print them yourself.
- Instead of sticking them to each person workstation, you could have a Kudos Wall that anyone can pass by and look. It is even better because 1) it’s public, 2) you could also do it any time not just on a specific time. 3) with the kudos card that are very colorful, the wall looks just stunning and it surely adds color and texture to your workplace.
And finally, Thank You
So I want to thank you for your attention and thank you for reading this article (until the end :) hopefully). I hope you found it useful and especially motivated you to do it in your own context.
