It can be easy to overlook the contributions of individual team members and instead focus on the success of your whole company when your employees are reaching their goals and operations are running smoothly. However, neglecting to share feedback and acknowledge how your employees’ individual efforts have led to your company’s successes can make your employees feel underappreciated, leading to low productivity rates, low morale, and high employee turnover.
A 2023 survey by Gartner found that almost 70% of employees surveyed aren’t feeling as engaged in the workplace as they should be. This feeling of disengagement is partly due to employees feeling that their feedback on their experiences in the workplace is not being addressed adequately.
Gartner’s survey also found that employees don’t understand how their organizations plan to increase engagement. Gartner recommends that HR professionals develop a shared language with employees and discuss their experiences with them so they can make informed decisions about employee engagement based on employee feedback.
HeyTaco encourages teams to increase employee engagement at every level by enabling three types of employee recognition: peer-to-peer recognition, top-down recognition, and HeyTaco rewards. Using employee recognition and rewards to increase engagement at every level helps teams eliminate organizational silos and foster a culture of open communication within the entire organization. When employees are encouraged to share feedback between teams and across managerial levels, HR professionals can learn how to work with team members at every level of their organization to make actionable changes that best address employees’ concerns.
When you encourage your employees to share feedback and promptly show appreciation for positive feedback while taking steps to address the sources of negative feedback, you show employees that their input has value.
Showing employees that their input is valued can improve their morale, increase productivity, encourage them to share feedback with their managers and colleagues, and foster a culture of gratitude.
Studies show that employees who receive meaningful, individualized feedback quickly and frequently are more motivated to do outstanding work. When employees express gratitude when giving feedback to their peers, they create a more productive, harmonious, and positive work environment.
HeyTaco allows team members to share feedback and recognize each other’s successes by tagging their messages with Taco Tags. Taco Tags are hashtags that team members can add to their messages to draw attention to company values, goals, discussion topics, or anything else they can think of. Taco Tags are designed to be flexible so teams can customize HeyTaco to fit their company’s culture.
HeyTaco’s Taco Tags use an open tagging system, so employees can tag their messages freely and share their insights quickly without having their messages flagged by moderators. The open tagging system encourages employees and team leaders to work together to discover how they can best implement HeyTaco rather than forcing employees to comply with specific use guidelines and only allowing them to tag their messages with a predetermined set of company hashtags.
As your company develops its Taco Economy, you can use employee feedback to adjust how you use HeyTaco. For instance, if employees tend to use tags to manage their projects, your team leaders can adapt their recognition strategy by rewarding extra virtual tacos to employees who share the most insightful or creative ideas under each project’s tag during project debriefing meetings.
Your company’s core values are the fundamental principles that guide your organization. Reinforcing your company’s core values and encouraging your employees to embody them helps shape your company’s culture. It also promotes cooperation among team members as everyone works to fulfill common goals that are guided by your company’s core values.
Using an employee recognition program like HeyTaco can help you remind employees of your company’s core values as you recognize and reward employees who embody those values in the workplace. For example, during discussions and meetings, you can ask your employees to use Taco Tags to tag their messages with relevant company values, then reward virtual tacos to employees who embody those values when contributing to the discussions.
Recognizing and rewarding employees whose messages and Taco Tags demonstrate an understanding of your company’s values ensures that your employee engagement strategy is purposeful and aligns with your company goals, which makes the recognition and rewards more meaningful.
If you haven’t had experience with employee recognition programs, introducing HeyTaco to your employees and using it to encourage positive feedback and multiple forms of recognition while sharing and enforcing your company’s values might seem complicated and inconvenient. However, with careful planning, you can use Taco Tags to build employee recognition practices into your company's existing procedures.
Adding HeyTaco to your company’s existing procedures can simplify your team’s transition to using Taco Tags and virtual tacos to share positive feedback and build a culture of recognition. You can incorporate HeyTaco into your workflows, introduce your team to HeyTaco’s features, and help your team adjust to using Taco Tags to share feedback with these techniques:
Teaching new employees how to use HeyTaco during onboarding can help them learn more about your company’s values and procedures and become acclimated to your company’s culture. You can introduce your new employees to HeyTaco by providing them with an easy-to-follow guide that explains how your company uses HeyTaco.
Your HeyTaco guide should include an overview of HeyTaco’s features, an explanation of how your company uses HeyTaco, an explanation of why employee recognition is important to your organization, a list of your company’s core values, and an explanation of how your new employee can use Taco Tags to add company values to their messages and earn virtual tacos that they can redeem for rewards.
Pairing your new employee with an existing employee who can show them how to use HeyTaco’s features and answer their questions about your employee recognition program can help them feel more comfortable using HeyTaco.
Once your new employee is comfortable using HeyTaco, ask them to invite them to give you feedback on how your company uses HeyTaco and ask them to suggest ways that you can make your employee recognition program better. Although you may feel that your current employee recognition program is perfect, it can be helpful to get an opinion from someone new to your company who has an outside perspective.
Company newsletters are a great way to recognize your employees, depict your company’s culture, and encourage employee feedback. If your company has an internal newsletter, consider recognizing your employees with HeyTaco shoutouts. You can dedicate a section of your newsletter to providing an overview of your team’s most used Taco Tags, featuring some of your top virtual taco earners, and showcasing some of the HeyTaco rewards that were recently redeemed from your company’s Taco Shop.
Sharing your company’s HeyTaco wins in your company’s internal newsletter can encourage team members to use HeyTaco to congratulate each other for the accomplishments listed in the newsletter, thus continuing the cycle of appreciation and gratitude, spreading more positivity, and reinforcing your core values.
Mandatory meetings often make employees feel disinterested, especially if the meetings’ topics have been discussed previously or employees aren’t given opportunities to contribute meaningfully. But you can use HeyTaco to make your meetings more engaging and fun.
Consider doing a HeyTaco icebreaker at the beginning of your next team or all-staff meeting. You can recognize and congratulate the employee who has earned the most virtual tacos and the employee who has given out the most virtual tacos since the previous meeting. Acknowledging your team members’ accomplishments at the start of meetings reinforces the importance of peer-to-peer recognition in the workplace and builds a stronger, happier company culture.
During meetings, you can use TacoTV, a feature within HeyTaco, to display your team members’ messages on your office’s TVs. With TacoTV, recognition messages are automagically displayed along with the number of virtual tacos that the messages have received for all of the meeting attendees to read. Using TacoTV puts the meeting’s focus on HeyTaco and employee recognition so everyone can share moments of appreciation and gratitude together while discussing company values and catching up on HeyTaco messages they may have missed while away from their computers.
You can wrap up your meetings by having your team members send a HeyTaco message that shares a highlight of the meeting, tag the message with a company value that was embodied during the meeting, and, if they would like to, send a virtual taco to someone who contributed meaningfully during the meeting. Wrapping up your meetings by sharing highlights, company values, and virtual tacos in HeyTaco helps bring your team closer and makes the meeting more memorable.
Reminding your team to send virtual tacos and spread positivity with TacoTags every day can help you turn HeyTaco into a routine and a habit. However, if you want to build a culture of gratitude and make HeyTaco an integral part of your company’s workflow, it’s better to turn using HeyTaco into a company ritual.
What’s the difference between routines, habits, and rituals? Routines are behaviors that are determined by certain circumstances. For example, holding company-wide meetings on Mondays and submitting quarterly reviews are routines because the tasks depend on the date.
Habits are routines that typically involve little to no conscious thought. For example, an employee may have a habit of visiting a specific restaurant during their lunch break every day.
Unlike habits, rituals are deliberate actions that aim to yield a specific outcome and change a person’s emotional state. Developing rituals in the workplace can boost team members’ self-esteem, increase productivity, and lower stress and anxiety levels.
Using HeyTaco in company rituals, such as sharing company updates in your newsletter and Slack or Microsoft Teams channels, can positively affect your team members by making them feel more appreciated and happier in the workplace.
You can use HeyTaco’s team leaderboards and analytics to view your team’s Taco Economy data and acknowledge the week's top virtual taco givers and receivers in Slack or Microsoft Teams. Rewarding your top HeyTaco users with public recognition can encourage your employees to celebrate each other's accomplishments and your company’s progress toward work goals, fostering collaboration and reinforcing company values.
If you’d like to involve your employees in choosing the HeyTaco user who will be recognized, you can have your team vote on who they believe has sent the most valuable tagged messages during the week. You can create a poll for your employees using a website like StrawPoll or Polly.ai or have them send their votes to your HR manager to keep voting anonymous. Involving all your employees in the decision can help you further employee engagement and increase your company’s sense of camaraderie.
At the end of the week, you can further recognize your employees by featuring your picks for the week's top virtual taco givers and receivers, along with your employees’ pick for the team member who has sent the most valuable tagged messages in your company’s newsletter.
If you’d like to acknowledge the winners with tangible rewards, you can have them choose a reward from your company’s Taco Shop that they can receive without spending their virtual tacos.
Incorporating custom Taco Tags into your Slack or Microsoft Teams discussions and celebrating your employees with tagged messages and virtual tacos can boost employee morale and foster a positive environment. By sharing positive feedback with your employees, celebrating your team’s achievements, and recognizing each employee’s contributions, you can reinforce the importance of gratitude and show your team members that their ideas and hard work are valued.
Start building a culture of gratitude today by posting a message in Slack or Microsoft Teams, tagging the message with one of your company’s core values, adding a virtual taco, and tagging a team member who embodies the value, then use leaderboards and analytics to see how using Taco Tags to recognize your employees’ achievements has increased positivity and recognition both in your organization’s Slack or Microsoft Teams channel and your workplace.