by Piotr Medyński, Founder & co-CEO of ISOLUTION
In our company ISOLUTION, we’ve been using Kudo Cards for three years and it works great, supporting us in building a culture of appreciation. In this article I would like to describe how we’ve used the Kudo concept to create a culture book that works well for our team.
The challenge with building culture is to be sure that your values and culture work together. We didn’t know what to do or how to do it. Some people use surveys but that’s not how we operate.
We spent a lot of time considering whether our values really work in our organization? So how could we find out?
We didn’t want to use any annual workshop or survey and so after searching we finally found the solution. Kudo Cards!
It’s a fantastic tool which lets us collect genuinely appreciative stories from colleagues, because working on values and culture is also connected with people.
So we decided to add the Kudo Cards to our values and by doing so we expanded the Kudos into a powerful tool, one that works all the time and that lets us observe whether our values and culture are having an impact.
We call this concept, the social culture book, an extremely important tool for our company culture and team
It’s a culture book created by our society and it’s evolved over time. These are the values we have in our culture book today. The numbers in brackets indicate the number of Kudo Cards people used associated with that value.
- Collaboration (7,364)
- Trust (1,682)
- Responsibility (907)
- Engagement (3,105)
- Development (742)
Why is this so effective?
We know that our values are always living and top of mind, not only during an annual workshop or survey, but all-year-round. We know which values don’t work and we know where to focus our attention.
Our culture is constantly evolving and we continue engaging our people on this process. People like the culture book because it’s easy to access and it’s transparent. We can also observe the culture book within different levels of the organization, across various projects and teams.
How can you extend this concept?
You can add a value to Merit Money, we did it and it works in the same way as with Kudos. We first worked out a list of values during the workshop and by using this concept you can let your people use any value they want. The values are indicated with the ‘#’ same as with Kudo Cards.
After some time you can adjust the list and prepare the first version of the culture book. You can also add a list of behaviours to every value. It’s important to explain to people how we understand each value, especially if the value is more abstract, for example for something like trust.
Read on: The Management 3.0 Team uses Bonus.ly to appreciate each other remotely. We also connect that to our team values and merit money. Want to know more? Listen to our team podcast or read the transcript.
Learn more about Motivation and Engagement during a Management 3.0 workshop near you.
