Kudo cards
Or: How to show respect and gratitude on peer level
Truth be told, this idea is neither new nor our own. But still it is a great idea and for me the best and most “natural” approach to create better collaboration and connection between teams: Kudo cards.
Everybody enjoys getting positive feedback, praise or a simple “thank you”. At the same time we are pretty stingy when it comes to giving praise — at least without any further agenda or hidden thoughts. Using compliments and praise to further one’s own means is much more frequent.
And so strange things will happen, when you give someone an honest compliment: you will confuse them. Let me tell you two short stories before getting to the point of this article.
Last week, when I came back to office from my quite long holidays, a colleague of mine told me he likes my new hair style. Automatically I responded “This?! Well, I went to bed with damp hair”. Classic!
A situation even more curious and absolutely unnecessary happened to me as I was leaving the wedding of a friend of mine. It was a great party and I really enjoyed the location where we were celebrating. So I wanted to tell this to the owner. It didn’t work out so well. He was scowling at me as he waited for the part where I was going to complain about something. It took another five minutes or so to explain to him that I was highly pleased with the place and even more with his very attentive crew and I just wanted to let him now. He was so used to getting only complains or negative feedback about minor issues that he couldn´t handle my praise.
It’s a thing which seems to be quite common in the world. Otherwise I can’t explain why Jurgen Appelo’s Kudo cards are so highly liked around the world.
The setup is fairly easy: You need a box (e. g. a shoebox), maybe pimp it a bit so it’s nice to look at and now you distribute some cards to your co-workers so they may fill them out and throw them into your recently made kudo box. Of course you may purchase Jurgen’s Kudo cards from his Management 3.0 shop, but it isn’t that hard making your own cards.
Now comes the fun part — how to encourage your colleagues to use these new cards to say thank you.
For us at Bauer + Kirch a combination of pretty easy approaches worked out very well:
- Leading by example: Our CEOs were involved right from the beginning and I convinced them to come up with about half of the first wave of Kudo cards.
- Mobilize the “Early Adopters”: I actively looked for some colleagues of who I had hopes that they would join me in the first wave — to give some counterweight to the CEO Kudos.
- Keep reminding them: A colleague came up with KudoBot, who posted at random times into our company’s chat to remind or even inspire us to write some Kudo cards.
- A non-rewarding reward: As our CEOs got more and more into the idea of Kudos they wanted to encourage this approach even more. But there is nothing more poisonous for a system of give honest feedback and praise than competition. So it took some time to find a fitting reward but we found it: At the end of the year the two colleagues with the highest amount of Kudos written and with the highest amount of Kudos received would have the honour to decide which non-profit organisations will receive our yearly donation this time.
- Explain what and why: Of course you need to tell the people why they should start writing Kudo cards. To address this I used our “Updatefrühstück” (I think I will write about this in the future). As I had everybody’s attention I finished my explanation with some first real Kudos I handed over after reading them out loud.
- Continuous emptying of the box: Every monthly “Update Frühstück” we empty the Kudo box, try to decipher the various cards and hand them over to the person mentioned.
Looking back I am more than happy with the idea and how we set it in motion. Most colleagues are collecting their Kudo cards somewhere around their working space to have them in sight. Teams are putting their cards up at the team boards and near the coffee lounge there is a wall covered in dozens Kudos of general praise or thanks.
Was there a change in the collaboration as mentioned at the beginning of this article?
Well, to argue that “cooperative” behaviour has increased dramatically thanks to the Kudo cards would be a bold claim. Nevertheless I am absolutely convinced that there is a lot of satisfaction and joy involved when somebody gives you a card with honest praise or gratitude for something you put a lot of effort into. So at least it is very likely that you will keep up helping others if you can see that this help is appreciated
One last comment:
The decision to involve CEOs into this matter wasn’t an easy one. The main principle of Jurgen’s Kudo cards is that the feedback is peer to peer, not gathering ammunition for your next salary negotiation. We still choose to include them because on the one hand we like to see Bauer + Kirch as a company where this kind of calculating behaviour is neither used nor needed and on the other hand because our CEOs wanted to focus more on praising engagement and support than “good work” or “cost-effective solutions”.
I hope that you are able to take something out of this article to start your own Kudo box or maybe revive your old box if you already tried and failed in the past.
