Building a culture of gratitude – key steps on your HeyTaco journey

Every team and Taco Economy is different, but there are a few key habits that all healthy taco economies have in common. The features in HeyTaco offer an opportunity to be used to strengthen your Taco Economy, and used strategically, can help you build a culture where saying thank you is how you roll. After that, that’s what the purpose is = to make saying thank you and celebrating each other second nature. We merely exist to help you build that habit and make it fun.

Step #1: The trial.

Our trial guide talks about how to take advantage of the 30 free day trial to see whether HeyTaco will work for your team. The guide provides more detail, but here are the 4 key steps to winning your trial:

1. Add HeyTaco to a single celebrations channel.
2. Start giving tacos, and give them at least a few days in a row.
3. Add ‘taco shoutouts’ as an agenda item to your company meetings.
4. Celebrate your top givers.

Once you trial is over and you are continuing your HeyTaco journey, continue building rituals and habits with your team that keep appreciation and gratitude top of mind and highlight their importance.

Step #2: Rituals.

A couple rituals that healthy Taco Economies do are a continuation of the rituals we recommend in the free trial.

1. Taco shoutouts – at a cadence that works for you (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly – anything less frequent is too infrequent to be meaningful) bring a few most meaningful taco messages shared in your channels to a live company meeting. Bring people who received or gave the taco to share the story behind it to provide more context. This will allow you to publicly teach and reinforce the behaviors you want to encourage and celebrate (and see more of), as well as highlight that sharing appreciation is important. Not to forget that public story sharing will allow other members of your team to learn what others are working on and feel proud of the company they work for that celebrates employees.
2. Celebrating top givers on the leaderboard - celebrating the receivers is what we think we ought to do, but it is the givers that are taking the action we want them to take and sharing gratitude. The healthiest Taco Economies are passionate about celebrating their givers, and research has shown that the giving leaderboards help improve employees helping behavior and collaboration. For example, celebrate the top giver with a custom made taco trophy or a unique T Shirt that is only given to taco givers.
   
   

Step 3: Rewards.

After you have had a chance to build some meaningful rituals and habits, it is time to start thinking about rewards. We always recommend waiting to add rewards for two reasons: 1) it allows people to build a habit of sharing gratitude intrinsically, vs being incentivized by things outside themselves, and 2) it allows you to see initial engagement and design and price rewards that would work for your team.

When executed strategically (read: not just adding a bunch of gift cards to the Taco Shop), rewards can add enthusiasm and energy into your Taco Economy. We recommend starting with a few rewards, like the Tacos for Charity Team Reward that allows everyone to collectively contribute to a join charity donation. People will rally towards a common goal and be excited to use their hard-earned tacos.

Here are some reward ideas we have seen people have success with over the years, and whenever you are ready to launch some, let us know if you’d like some help.

Step 4: Connect Taco Giving to company values

After you have built a habit of gratitude in the first place, it is time to sprinkle the tacos with core values and see how those relate. Using Taco Tags, people can add hashtags to their taco messages designating what value is connected with their taco appreciation. HeyTaco will record those hashtags and track who and how many times has been recognized with it. You can then celebrate those people who are living your values and getting tacos for them.

Ready to get started on your HeyTaco journey? Start you free trial here!