Make it personal: Give Thanks with Kudos Thanks

I have been a huge enthusiast for applying gamification in the social software for the enterprise arena, and today I got even more thrilled. Our administrator just finished installing Kudos 1.4 on our Connections environment.

Human interaction: Give Thanks

With this next version of Kudos, which was recently released, it is now possible to add some human interaction. Previous versions were mainly measuring activities and behaviour through defined metrics and rewarding them with points and badges. Kudos Thanks lets you interact with a colleague by showing them your appreciation. You may give any of your colleagues your Thanks through some peer-to-peer badges.

What this means is that aside from the machine doing some rewarding through metrcis, you may now be rewarded personally by one of your colleagues. it is more intuative, not based on any metrics.

Build a culture of trust

We all like to get thanks. Kudos Thanks can help organisations to change their culture into a more openly and appreciative one. Many times I come across organisations where saying thanks is not the most common thing in the world. Showing your appreciation for good work done, though, is crucial for social software. To dare to share by collaborating more openly there needs to be a culture of trust. Appreciation for ones transparency and public sharing will build this trust.

Employee of the month

One of the Kudos Thanks Badges is the 'Employee of the month' Badge. At many organisations there is already such a thing. The employee of the month may be put out on a poster or a billboard, or be announced at a group event. Now that appreciation van be displayed in Kudos as well. I changed the settings for this badge so that it can only be awarded by a specified group: management. It's very easy to create a group, just add the names from the addressbook type-ahead.

For any of the Kudos Thanks badges you may specify which group can award them, and how often it can be awarded. This makes it possible to design very targeted Thanks Badges. You may want to design one specifically aimed at rewarding the top sales person of the month. You could set that one to be awarded only by the sales director.

How to give Thanks?

From your Profile page there are two ways to give thanks:

• Go to the ThanksSummary widget and click on Thank Someone
• Go to the Kudos Thanks tab

From the left box you can select whom you want to give thanks to, what kind of badge you want to give, and write your personal message as to why.

Give Thanks using Kudos Thanks