Looking back, we accomplished a lot in the 2022 calendar year (and there's yet more to come before the year is over 😉). You may not know that CultureBot was initially developed as the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 forced our team into a fully remote work style for the first time. As our team began working from home full-time we realized it was harder and harder to make the core pieces of our culture stay glued together. We knew that the little things were what really grounded a culture -- the hallway conversations and side chats that led to tighter team bonds amongst one another.

The idea of CultureBot has really grown since those early days, with our mission now to become "the one Slack app to manage company culture." We think we're well on our way with an average 5-star ranking on G2's product review site.

To better understand where we're going in 2023, it helps to take a look back at what we delivered over the course of 2022 – let's review... 🥳

Team Shoutouts

Early in the year we had conversations with several customers and we were hearing a lot (still) about a desire to bring teammates closer together. After proposing a few ideas we got the most positive sentiment around the 'shoutouts' idea – a way to share positive kudos/feedback with each other in a fun and graphical way.

Employee Intros

Another thought that came up quite frequently in conversations with people and wellness leaders was a way to connect employees together to get to know one another, especially new hires. With this, we developed (and delivered) in just a short couple months the employee intros feature. With intros, you are able to connect teammates on Slack with each other in groups of 2 - 5 people at a time. For those who are a bit more introverted, we even threw in the option to add on a conversation starter from our water cooler topics feature.

Peer Rewards

Peer rewards we knew would be an awesome natural extension of our shoutouts feature. How do they work? Employees are given a monthly allowance of "points" they can attach to shoutouts when sending them. These points can be redeemed inside of CultureBot for rewards (that you as the admin are able to setup and track fulfillment on). Points can be capped as well so that employees don't send all of their points in one go to their best work friend(s).

Custom Shoutouts

Custom shoutouts is perhaps the most exciting update we've ever released to an existing feature. We got a lot of strong feedback on this before building it, so we knew it was going to resonate well. In a nutshell, custom shoutouts are a way to structure your shoutout types in a way that match your company or cultural values. This is a great way to incentivize your employees to think about how to better represent your values on a daily basis (as they can be, quite literally, rewarded for it)!  

Usage Analytics

Usage analytics provides (for the first time) a look into how CultureBot is being utilized in certain areas – from birthdays to anniversaries, shoutouts, and even trivia. Teams can set this report up to send as a direct message via Slack at the beginning or end of a week, or beginning of a month (so you don't even need to worry about checking up on it).

Looking Ahead to 2023

Now – for the most exciting part. Coming into year two of CultureBot, we have a lot in store to not only improve employee engagement for remote teams, but also to gain better insights and understanding into team morale.

Later this month we plan to announce the launch of custom celebrations, which will enable teams to setup celebrations for things like holidays, awareness days – pretty much anything worth celebrating (like a company years since founding birthday, for example).

Beyond this, we see our team developing welcome spotlights – a way to welcome your new hires in a fun, graphical way (similar to shoutouts) (after they answer a few specific questions that you setup and want highlighted – examples could be where they're from, where they went to school, their hobbies, etc.).

From here we see onboarding forms allowing you to send out standardized questionnaires to all of your employees to collect similar information to that of the welcome form, which would enable teams to collect/aggregate data on employee interests/hobbies – the sky's the limit!

Last but not least, we'll start work on pulse surveys, a  big endeavor, but one that will allow you to replace any existing survey/form solutions you're using today (such as google forms, survey monkey, etc.) and get much higher participation/response rates. Imagine setting up custom surveys for evaluating team health or eNPS or even nominations (e.g. employee of the month) and having it all sent by CultureBot inside of Slack – with CultureBot doing the follow ups on your behalf.

And... that's a wrap! We wish all of our customers and people leaders everywhere wonderful end of the year and a prosperous 2023. We are excited for what's to come in the new year for our team and our product and cannot wait to share the ride with you every step of the way.

The best is yet to come,

~ Amy