When Colleagues Can Praise Each Other at the Push of a Button

HeyTaco is a platform for users of the Slack messaging system to praise co-workers. Photo: Hey Taco

Kindergartners are used to sticker charts, where good behavior gets them stars that are displayed in front of the whole class. Now some employees are getting similar treatment.

Who got more praise today, you or one of your colleagues? In a growing number of offices, it’s a metric everyone can see. Users of the chat platform Slack, which has started to replace email in some offices, can now use plug-ins like HeyTaco, Growbot and others not only to praise each other publicly with complimentary messages, but also to track how much praise everyone is getting.

Users of these tools say this is a good way to boost morale; research shows peer recognition can increase workers’ engagement and retention. But some users, behavioral experts and even providers say it can backfire as well, by creating a popularity contest in the office, complete with cheating and resentment.

Showing appreciation

“We try to build a habit of appreciation and encourage people to give and receive props and kudos at least a couple times a week,” says Jeremy Vandehey, Growbot’s chief executive. He says Growbot also helps employees to get feedback more frequently than through annual reviews.

Growbot says more than 8,000 teams have used its product. HeyTaco counts more than 2,000 teams as users of its technology, including people at companies, churches and schools, says Chief Executive Doug Dosberg.

With HeyTaco, an employee who wants to recognize a colleague can send her a message in Slack—for instance, “Great presentation!”—and add a taco emoji to the message. Everyone in the office gets five tacos a day to hand out.

Growbot monitors conversations going on in team chats for expressions such as “thanks,” “danke,” or even “booya,” Mr. Vandehey says. When it notices a compliment, it adds its own supportive message to the conversation to reinforce the original praise.

In most cases, bosses and other co-workers using HeyTaco, Growbot or similar tools can see who’s praising whom; leaderboards show who’s getting the most shout-outs; and often points are tallied that can be traded in for rewards like gift cards or time off.

Insight for managers

“We’ll say thanks and give people a taco,” says Nick Bolton, chief executive of London technology company Symless, who has been using HeyTaco for the past few months with his team of about 10 people. “Whereas before we would just say thanks. It’s kind of like adding an icing onto the thanks.”

Mr. Bolton says HeyTaco has been useful to give him insight into how his team is feeling. On days when few tacos are handed out, “the team isn’t communicating very well.…Perhaps morale is low because something didn’t go the way we wanted,” he says.

Jeff Bates, executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of Hood County, Texas, introduced HeyTaco to his 20 employees a few months ago, to get them to connect more with each other and “brag on” each other to reinforce the good things they do, he says.

It also helps him keep tabs on what’s happening at three different locations that he supervises. “They may be doing great stuff. I’m oblivious. Now I’m in the loop,” says Mr. Bates.

He says he views HeyTaco not as a “review system” but as a “conversation starter.” He says the praise one employee received via HeyTaco, for example, made him realize he had underestimated her. At the same time, “if you are one of those who doesn’t want to thank people, boy, that stands out, too,” Mr. Bates says.

Just a gimmick?

The convenience of praising colleagues in the course of daily interactions sets these platforms apart from other software systems for employee recognition, says Neil Shastri, leader of global insights and innovation at Aon Hewitt, a consulting company. With other software systems, an employee would have to log into a separate website to praise a colleague.

It’s also different because “it’s almost like the language has changed,” Mr. Shastri says. “These are no longer words of appreciation, but more fun, pictures. These are more in the tone of WhatsApp or Snapchat.”

But not everyone gets the feel-good vibe the developers think their technology provides.

“At best, this is the sort of silly, unnecessary gimmick that leads you to roll your eyes,” says Alfie Kohn, an author and lecturer on human behavior, education and parenting. “At worst it’s the latest example in treating workers like pets by giving them a verbal doggy biscuit for jumping through hoops.”

Digital kudos, like bonuses and award ceremonies, can backfire, Mr. Kohn says, by shifting people’s motivations, so that they aim to do work not because they care about it but because of the expectation of a reward.

“When people feel alienated and ignored and burned out at their job, it isn’t because they didn’t receive enough pats on the head,” he says. “It’s because the work itself isn’t meaningful or they didn’t have any choice or they don’t feel part of a collaborative community. Something like this does absolutely nothing to address those three substantive problems people have.”

Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, cautioned that praise can easily be cheapened. “The wrong way is to give a trophy for just showing up,” she says.

Shifting the focus

Mr. Dosberg acknowledges that HeyTaco’s reward system can backfire. He says he feels that tracking the number of tacos everyone has received can defeat the motivational purpose of HeyTaco, and the company is trying to shift users away from an emphasis on who gets the most praise to a focus on giving praise.

“Our system is very focused on receiving. We are going to be much more focused on giving rather than receiving,” he says, with some new features. That will include encouraging people to hand out tacos by rewarding the biggest givers with access to additional emojis like “supertacos”—a much more prominent version of the standard taco— to allow them to make an even bigger impression with their praise.

Developers of both HeyTaco and Growbot say they also have noticed instances of people gaming the system by, for instance, agreeing to trade messages of praise with colleagues. Developers are trying to deal with cheating by making their systems more transparent, so that it’s obvious, for instance, when the same person gives another person kudos all the time.

In the big picture, HeyTaco’s Mr. Dosberg is worried about the system being taken too seriously. It isn’t meant to spark competition among co-workers jostling for attention in order to get ahead, the HeyTaco chief says. The goal, he says, is simply “to inspire people to be more appreciative, not to get people fired or promoted.”

That happens, sometimes, he says. “It scares me. It makes me so worried. Sometimes I can’t sleep.”

Ms. Chernova is a special writer for The Wall Street Journal in New York. Email: yuliya.chernova@wsj.com .