How to avoid unauthentic feedbacks with recognition softwares

A question that people often ask when they’re about to implement an employee recognition software is how do you avoid unauthentic feedbacks. This would lead to counter-productive efforts and un-meaningful praises.

To make sure we are on the same page: one of the first thing to ask is how do you define an authentic feedback?

Authentic feedback should be specific, genuine, and based on real accomplishments or behaviors.

In this article, we’ll see how do you avoid unauthentic feedbacks with employee recognition softwares.

1. Lead by Example

The best way to drive a good behavior is to be the first to do it. You want your coworkers to send authentic and meaningful recognitions? Then send authentic and meaningful recognitions yourself, they’ll follow. People get influenced by behaviors around them and tend to mimic them.

The behavior of managers is especially important because it’ll show the way for all teams that he/she is leading. These behaviors are watched.

2. Choose wisely the rewards available

One way to drive adoption to a recognition software is to list some rewards that people can redeem with the points collected thanks to the feedback they received.

Please note that the points people can use to redeem the rewards are only the ones they received.

To prevent people to game the system to get more rewards out of it, a common practise is to make sure the rewards are not too “money-oriented”. You’d want to have some of them that are some kind of vouchers but you’d also want to vary with non-monetary rewards like trophies, badge, day-off or even team rewards. You can find many examples of monetary, non-monetary and team rewards in this article.

3. Everything is public

Transparency is key if you want recognitions to be impactful. It is highly recommended to publish the feedbacks publicly in a channel where all members of the company are included.

The fact to make everything public will prevent weird behaviors. It’s like in everyday’s life, someone could give a fake feedback just to gain anything out of it but he’ll eventually get noticed and have a bad reputation. It’s the same online when messages are posted publicly under your name.

Don’t mix performance/bonuses with recognition/team bonding

You need to make sure not to draw a line between the recognitions/kudos system and the performance reviews and bonuses. If you do so, people will take it as a goal for their own personal success and it will lose its genuineness and recognition towards others.

Use gamification features – choose the right software

Recognition softwares have very different approaches when it comes to pushing people to send kudos. For example at Clappy Kudos, we introduced Levels so that people can unlock different levels thanks to their activities.

Conclusion

You now have several best practises to use in order to avoid unauthentic feedbacks when using an employee recognition software. Let us know what method works well in your company in the comment section!

If you’re looking to implement a recognition software, check-out Clappy Kudos.