Appreciations at work

One slack notification at a time

If you use slack, then like me, you are probably familiar with the constant beeping of multiple channels. It’s very easy to get tuned out of all the busyness and long discussion threads. Unfortunately, that seems to increasingly becoming a permanent fixture of our remote work reality.

What is frequently lost in this remote working reality, are the small and random acts of kindness and appreciations which come more naturally in face to face interaction.

Our agile coach noticed that, and decided to start a #kudos slack channel, where we can post appreciations for small and seemingly insignificant acts of concrete help. Why add another channel? Why don’t just appreciate people in existing channels?

Here is an example of me giving appreciation to my colleague and invite him to the channel

Because the small token of appreciation will be drowned by other threads that have “higher priorities”. Having one place where people mentions others and appreciate their help sounds pretty good to me :)

And although the channel is public, we don’t invite 400+ people immediately. Instead, we opt for personal mentions and invite people gradually, we want people to be compelled to continue this and mention / invite other people in.

so far its getting good traction :) people starts inviting and appreciating others

We are just starting out, i’ll check back in a few weeks to see how our small experiment will turn out :)

Closing with a quote from Laszlo Bock:

“Simple, public recognition is one of the most effective and most underutilized management tools.”

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