We spend a lot of time thinking about different ways to promote positive team building and team culture building at CultureBot, and that's why we're very excited to show off the latest feature we've been cooking up since last month – peer rewards.

Why are we so excited? Well, peer rewards (we believe) are a great, organic way to get your employees more engaged with one another. We stole from the best on this idea – Google uses a similar system internally to get its employees to share positive feedback on a recurring basis. As it turns out, it was one of the most successful HR programs ever implemented at Google – nearly every single employee uses at least one peer reward on a quarterly basis. We think that's stupendous – so much so that we took a very similar framework when thinking through what peer rewards should look like inside CultureBot. Without further ado – let's jump in to show you how it all works under the hood...

How Peer Rewards Work

The whole idea of sharing peer rewards is to congratulate and appreciate another member of your team for their hard work. To share "peer rewards points" a teammate with CultureBot already installed inside of Slack can either type in "/shoutout" to a Slack channel or click on the "Send shoutout" button (that may already be inside of a channel where a shoutout was just shared). What you'll see next is below.

You have the option to share points with one or more members of your team – only up and until the amount of monthly points that your admin has allowed you to. If you try to share points with yourself, or too many points, the bot will prevent you from doing so.

So... you can start to start to get the idea of how the peer rewards and points system can catch on and quickly become contagious. The beauty of the system is that it runs itself and members of the team start to look out for new initiatives and ways they can prove themselves to others on their team, or go out of their way to help others, in an effort to try to obtain more points.

The best (and most incentivizing) part about all of this is that the points that are being awarded from peers can be redeemed for prizes (which are setup by the admin of CultureBot). The points you receive accrue indefinitely and can be redeemed at any time, but the monthly allowance of points that you can give out resets every month – so use it or lose it. The numbers of points you have left to give in a month and the number of redeemable points you've accumulated are both listed in the home page of CultureBot inside of Slack.

Last but not least there is also a leaderboard to show you where your whole team stands (for the current month) in terms of peer rewards points. This gives you a stack ranked idea of who is doing the most recently to level up the team and make it even better.

That's pretty much a wrap for this month as far as what's new inside of CultureBot. As always, we're keen to get your feedback on the tool and the updates we've been making. Our goal is to develop a tool that can impact your team's culture in ways both small and large. Drop us a line with any questions, comments, concerns, etc. at support(at)getculturebot.com and we'll be in touch. Until the next round of updates, be well and stay healthy!

Culture above all,

~ Amy