Configuration Guide

@Kudozza is a Microsoft Teams application which focuses on increasing appreciation within an organization with the help of kudos. All with the goal of strengthening the team culture.
While it works out of the box (once installed to a team), it has some tools and settings which benefit from being tailored towards your organization’s setup.

Prerequisit: Installation

There is a dedicated installation guide which describes how Kudozza can be installed to a team.
It covers topics which are also important for the governance:

  • Installation in teams/chats.
    We recommend to rollout Kudozza to all teams of an organization so it is omnipresent to the users
  • Adding the Kudozza tab to channels.
    At least every General channel of a Team should have a Kudozza team tab configured as it contains team related information
  • Configuration of Kudozza administrators.
    Only the users who installed Kudozza to a team are automatically made Kudozza administrators. You might want to promote additional colleagues to Kudozza administrator.

Once these basic steps are done, there are further configurations that can be done:

Enable or disable Kudozza for chats

Appreciation and recognition is best given in public.
For this reason we recommend to use Kudozza in Teams only as there is usually a much wider audience involved.

However, Kudozza also supports kudos giving in chats.
Depending on your organizations policies you might want to enable or disable this capability.
You find the configuration in the personal mode->Settings->Features

Engable or disable kudos in chats

Kudos Render Format

Kudozza comes with a clean default look for kudos, but it allows to adapt the kudos format to a certain degree. E.g. if your organisation is just starting with kudos, you might want to have a visually outstanding kudos. The downside is, that this consumes a lot of precious space (and attention).
If your organization has recognized the value of giving many kudos and kudos are all over your channels, you might want something visually simpler and more compact.

Therefore it is possible to:

  • Use a default image that is displayed with every kudos (gets replaced if a tag with image is used in the kudos)
  • Change/Translate the intro sentence for the kudos
  • Use a header for that intro sentence or render it in front of the kudos
  • Render the link reference into it’s own line or keep it attached to the kudos

You find these settings in personal mode->Settings->Appearance

Kudos appearance configurator

Kudos Notifications&Overview

Kudozza follows the principle that praise is most powerful if it is shared in public.

Kudozza has two different mechanisms that increase the visibility of kudos to a wider audience:

  • Arena channels
  • Kudos Digest

The Kudos Digest view is part of the Kudozza Team Tab and also available in the personal mode of Kudozza. The difference is that in the teams tab, only kudos of the specific team are displayed while in personal mode kudos of all the teams the user is a member of are displayed.

Kudos Digest views have the downside, that they require the user to visit the page proactively to view all the kudos.

To get notifications whenever a kudos is posted, you can set up a dedicated channel per team with the name Kudozza Arena or Kudos Arena. Kudozza will pick it up automatically and will from then on send a notification per kudos into that channel.

An organization wide Kudozza Arena channel across all teams is also possible. Please contact us for this as Kudozza currently lacks the self-service configuration for this.

Leaderboard

Every Kudozza Team Tab and also the personal app contains a user overview:

User overview in Team Tab

By default, it displays the statistics of the current user, a banner with the active challenges and a ranking by score which includes all recent users of Kudozza.

If your organizations regulations and/or member sensitivities do not allow for a ranking, you can switch it off or restrict it at personal mode->Settings->Features.

The options are:

  • Show no information about the other users at all. Only information about the current user.
  • Show only the participants in a currently active challenge. Without kudos or score or ranking.
  • Show all users with the number of given and received kudos but without score and ranking.
  • Show only the top 10 users with score and ranking. This is to motivate users by showing what is possible to reach.
  • Show all users with score and ranking (default).

Hashtags

Users can use #hashtags in kudos by simply typing the # sign in the text entry dialog.
A list of pre-configured hashtags is displayed to choose from. However, the user can also freely enter whatever hashtag is on his mind.

The pre-defined list can be edited within personal mode->Settings->Tags.
Please adapt the tags to something that makes sense in your organization.

Tags with images

To emphasize a tag, tags can have an image associated. A common use case for this are company values: Kudos carrying a tag representing a company value are visually highlighted and thus the value is easy to recognize. But it is also fun to just add some seasonal decoration to a kudos (e.g. introduce a #xmas hashtag with a decorative image associated).

A sample with a tag image

To add an image to a tag, use the edit button on an existing tag.
You can add more than one image to a tag. Kudozza will then pick randomly on every kudos.
Psychological research shows that users are more likely to perform an action if the outcome has a surprise element. In this case, the random tag image. Paid plans can upload custom images here.

Emoji - Icons

Emoji reactions are an important feature of Kudozza as they allow users to interact with a kudos and show that they share the appreciation. Users can select from a wide range of standard emojis for this.

Kudos reaction

In the paid plans, it is possible to upload department/team logos or logos for technical stacks or products.

Experience shows that users love to add these custom reactions and often use them to give a kudos more meaning or team identification. A source for custom “just-for-fun” icons is Slackmoji website. If you find icons you like, you can add them via the emoji upload to Kudozza.

Although every user can upload emoji reactions, you might want to set the stage by already uploading some initial icons. The functionality is located at personal mode->Settings->Emojis

Insights - Statistics

Kudozza has two types of statistics:

  • Team specific statistics within the Kudozza Team Tab are accessible to all team members
  • Global statisistics within personal mode->Insights->Activity page. Accessible only to the administrators.

The global statistic reports across all installed teams and give you a good idea how Kudozza is used across the organization and in which teams most kudos are given.

For some companies this is a great tool to get Kudozza working, for other companies that level of detail is impossible to have because of regulations. If you would like to have parts of the Insights tab removed, please use the personal mode->Settings->Contact Us functionality to let us know.

Badges

The goal of a “kudos culture” is that the giving of kudos becomes a habit within your organization: “I see something good and noteworthy = I give a kudos”
To form a habit it is necessary that users give kudos frequently.

Kudozza provides here an incentive through badges which are given for frequent usage.
Kudozza has some default badges based on the points a user gets by giving, receiving or taking part in a kudos.
The points and the badges are visible in the Kudozza Team Tab. Whenever the user reaches a given number of points within a period (75days) he is permanently awarded a badge.
Exemplary badge:

Example of a point badge

Challenges

The idea behind a challenge is to ask users to commit into the giving kudos for a longer period. This has multiple effects:

  • The users can develop a habit of giving kudos
  • If many users take part, the benefits of a kudos rich culture become obvious

Challenges can be scheduled on the page personal tab->Settings->Badges.
Challenges are organization wide, people across all teams can join them.

A challenge can last a freely defined number of weeks. A challenge week always starts Monday UTC at 00:00 and ends Sunday UTC at 23:59.

Users can onboard into a challenge in its first week by giving the number of kudos defined in the challenge.
Prepare the users before a challenge starts so they do not accidentally miss the first week.

Users taking part in a challenge are for example visible in the Kudozza Team Tab in the Badges section (this is also the place where challenges are advertised).
These users carry the badge of the challenge. It is grayed out until the user accomplishes the challenge. Should the user drop out of the challenge, the badge is removed again. In higher plans the badge can be uploaded, otherwise you can pick one from the list of provided badges.

Challenge advertisement

A user stays in the challenge by giving the configured number of kudos every week.
At the end of a week, Kudozza will remind every challenge participant who is still missing the kudos for the current week that he needs to give them in order to stay in the challenge.

If the user gives no kudos for a week, s/he drops out of the challenge. Except, s/he has some “skipweeks” left:
The longer the challenge, the more likely it is that users go on vacation or become sick or are temporarily too busy to give kudos.
Therefore, it is possible to configure “skipweeks” within a challenge. This is the number of weeks during a challenge in which a user does not need to give a kudos but remains in the challenge.