Kudos® vs. Small Improvements

Kudos is especially useful and helpful during project deployment where team members can be awarded kudos and appreciation and motivation for their team efforts in meeting milestones and targets. In some instances, the reward types or gifts may seem irrelevant to some departments in certain regions or my company' operations in other parts of the African continent.

I'm honestly not sure why my company chose to use Small Improvements. We used Lattice before for the all the same use cases I mentioned here. The employee performance review feature might be a bit better in Small Improvements, but the goal-setting tool and the 1:1 tool are very weak. I may not have benefitted yet from all the features that Small Improvements have to offer, but so far it looks like a pretty basic HR tool with much better alternatives out there. If it's cheaper than the competition, that might be the only argument to go with it.

Incentivized

• One of the most useful aspects of this tool is that it allows you to save the profile of each of the employees individually and to be able to track their activities and give them the recognition they deserve.
• Another useful feature of "kudos is that the system allows you to assign badges to each profile based on their job performance.
• I also really like that the platform has a dedicated portal for employees. In which they can see their badges, recognitions and awards obtained for their efforts.

Incentivized

• Take shared or private notes tied to each week's 1-1 meeting
• Remind each other of open action items until they are checked off
• Manage the performance review cycle

Incentivized

• Rewards take a long time to be given out, but this I would put on the company's policy.
• From my own perspective on a mobile phone, it's not so smooth like on desktop, like searching for a colleagues name sometimes is difficult.
• Sometimes email notifications take too long to come, or they don't even come at all.

Incentivized

• Interface can be cluttered at times
• There isn't a lot of help or knowledge readily available when first using the tool

Incentivized

I never had to contact their support so far. There's no "N/A" option so I'm going with a neutral "5".

Incentivized

I used to work at a company called Sparc that developed its own in-house platform called Teamphoria. It was great software that coupled a lot of the same features as workday but also with a recognition system. Essentially it allocated certain types of recognition levels per month, 1 platinum, 5 gold, 20 silvers, where each was worth a drawing ticket. At the end of the month, someone would be drawn from that pool based on their received recognition and then receive a gift card. However, some abused this system and devalued its purpose and inflated the meaning behind it. Kudos seems to do a good job by having a direct point/monetization system which isn't up for random chance. This can help even incentivize employees to go above and beyond, getting them to work harder since they are receiving recognition for it.

Incentivized

Lattice was able to link in with core OKRs whereas from my memory, Small Improvements didn't support this goal setting and tracking framework. While it was good for sentiment and management frameworks, it was unable to connect with the greater company vision as well as Lattice - that was the reason that we moved.

Incentivized

• Incentivizes employee to work harder.
• Helps with thanking our employees for jobs well done without having just a normal "Thank You."
• Allows the employees to use kudos for company SWAG or items they may need in their lives and it's all possible to get thanks to KUDOS.

Incentivized

• It helped keep my goals on track, both in documentation and email updates.
• It helped free up my manager's bandwidth to focus on other tasks.

Incentivized