Kudos is an intelligent system that alerts you to the people and ideas that warrant your attention.
It measures what people do: what they write, where they comment, to whom they connect, how they rate ideas, and much more. All of the factors measured are combined to give both people and ideas a simple rating of K1 (lowest) to K4 (highest). In addition, people are assigned a style based on their behavior (Collaborator, Creator, Builder, Evaluator, or Observer). Kudos works entirely in the background; it adds no complexity to employees’ participation in your business events.
With a single, simple setting, Kudos can be adapted to the general business goals of each event – from cultural engagement to pure problem-solving. Kudos results are displayed to employees and business sponsors in different ways to reinforce good behavior, while avoiding known demotivators.
Kudos matters because it can be both a measure and a driver of employee engagement. Engagement at work, in the sense of Gallup’s extensive research, is a vital factor with strong correlation to productivity and talent retention.
Well-designed Innovation Central challenges touch upon several of the major contributors to engagement: understanding of company strategy and direction, clarity and openness, and a belief that one’s efforts make a difference. For business leader, Kudos becomes a microscope to reveal your most-engaged people and provides a quick view of the most influential ideas in each event. For the individual employee, Kudos shows where they stand among their peers and suggests actions to increase their impact.
Engagement & Participation
The motivation to contribute at work is a huge and well-established field, which we can only touch upon here. Suffice it to say that sixty years of consistent research is key to the entire design and philosophy of Innovation Central and our advice about sponsorship, roles and responsibilities, event design, recognition, and motivation. Kudos the quickest view into engagement and participation because it is a comprehensive summary of actions and feedback in your Challenges.
Maslow (in the 1950’s), Herzberg (1960’s), Buckingham and Gallup (1990’s), and Pink (2009) have all found the baseline needs (safety, security, fair policies, fair salary) must be satisfied but are not sufficient to motivate people in jobs that demand intelligence, experience, and creative problem-solving. What does motivate intelligence workers is a light touch (autonomy), an opportunity to excel, and the ability to contribute to the visible goals of the organization.
Well-designed innovation Challenges touch on all of these motivators by asking people to contribute outside hierarchic boundaries and to find matches between serious business needs and their own knowledge and skills. Kudos shows people how they compare to their peers in level (Kudos levels K1 through K4) and style (type of contributions), and importantly offers advice on what these levels and styles mean and what specific behaviors might increase their impact and visibility.
Kudos is designed to provide broad levels of achievement for those who are interested and competitive while carefully avoiding fine-grained leaderboards, which are well known to demotivate and even offend employees when the emphasis of an activity is cooperation and teamwork. As Farmer and Glass observe,
“Avoid aggrandizing users driven by altruistic incentives — they don’t want their contributions to be counted, recognized, ranked, evaluated, compensated, or rewarded in any significant way. Comparing their work to anyone else’s will actually discourage them from participating.” (p. 113)
Herzberg summed it up best: “Forget praise. Forget punishment. Forget cash. Make their jobs more interesting instead.”
Finding People & Ideas
Sponsors of large, active innovation challenges soon discover that they don’t have a deficit of ideas, but a deficit of their own time and attention. Good sponsors want to be informed and engaged: they might need to delegate some of the idea evaluation to a review team, but they also know it’s important to maintain a close touch to the actual contributors and their ideas.
Kudos can help guide busy sponsors and administrators to the ideas and people that most merit their attention.
Kudos does its best to provide a measure of business value by giving high importance to actions by the sponsor or reviewers acting on their behalf. Thus reviews, conclusions, and related factors are a major part of a person’s or an idea’s Kudos level. If you conclude ideas in Innovation Central Kudos will be a good value metric.
However, it’s not always feasible to conclude ideas and the evaluation process usually doesn’t commence until the challenge is closed. In these cases Kudos is more reflective of participation and peer activities like 5-star voting and commenting. No one can guarantee that the crowd will always be wise, but high Kudos levels will reflect which ideas are garnering attention and excitement.
For the sponsor or administrator, Kudos may have its greatest value after an event is closed. At that time Kudos is closer to a valid business value measurement (as noted above) and people Kudos styles become relevant, as shown in these two scenarios:
- After completing the reviews process, an event sponsor realizes that while many of the ideas are good, they do not go far enough to address additional factors and issues in implementation. He wants to quickly assemble a team to build the top ideas into more complex, actionable concepts. By selecting all of his Kudos K3-K4 Collaborators and Creators he can form an ad-hoc team of people already shown to be informed and active around this topic.
- Several months after running an event, a sponsor has made some significant decisions and it’s time to announce changes within her department. She will hold a town hall meeting and send an email to communicate the changes, but she knows that tapping into informal personal networks is also crucial to a smooth transition. By recruiting her K3-K4 Builders and Collaborators, she has a ready- made team of change-champions to help.
Kudos focuses on individual behaviors. To focus on collaborative behaviors, consider leveraging Understanding Communities in Innovation Analytics.
How Kudos Works
Kudos aggregates several dozen measurable factors into a single level (K1 through K4) and, for people, a behavioral style. Importantly, Kudos levels depend not only on what a given employee has done, but equally on how others react to their contributions. Thus Kudos has virtuous cycles: a person who comments on others’ ideas generates Kudos value for themselves, for those ideas, and the authors of those ideas.
Kudos levels for people and ideas are calculated every night when the factors are collected globally and within an event.
A person can see their Kudos level and style on their profile and within the Personal space of an event. People can also see others’ Kudos information wherever a name appears as a blue link, such as an idea author’s name.
Kudos levels are presented in the broad K1, K2, K3, and K4 bins, with no finer granularity. This is deliberate and similar to star ratings for movies: you can expect three-star movies to be generally comparable in quality, but you realize it makes no sense to demand more precision – “Was that 3.2 or 3.3 stars?” – because at that level, reasonable people would disagree on the fine points.
Also, fine-grained rating systems are known to invite gaming behavior – “I’ll add more comments so I can pass Charlie on the leaderboard” – which dilutes valuable content and degrades the entire innovation system over time.
Kudos Levels
People get a Kudos level and Kudos style. These are calculated and displayed to people from data collected across all events; they are global. A person’s Kudos level and style is also calculated on a per-event basis, but this is only visible to Administrators so they can use it in the way discussed above.
Ideas are also assigned a Kudos level on very much the same basis as people. However, idea Kudos are calculated only on an event basis because the event is the context in which the ideas are relevant. Idea Kudos are visible to anyone reading an idea. Administrators can also view and export idea Kudos in list form to help them prepare summaries and reports.
The following short paragraphs are used in the online advice for Kudos:
Kudos Guidance for Ideas
Kudos is a measure of how noteworthy and impactful an idea is in an Innovation Central Challenge. The level of an idea (with K1 the lowest and K4 the highest) depends on the quantity and type of activity that idea receives. For example, an idea that is simply read once or twice will have a low rating, while one that garners lots of comments, links, votes will be higher. Ideas that get strong attention from reviewers (who represent the original goals of the event sponsor) will get the highest ratings.
Kudos Guidance for People
Kudos is a measure of your participation and impact in Innovation Central Challenges, relative to your peers.
Your Kudos level (with K1 the lowest and K4 the highest) depends on what you do and what others do with ideas you have entered. For example, reading others’ ideas is good but does not contribute strongly to your Kudos level. Entering original ideas is much more powerful, and even more so if others add comments, send links, vote, or give favorable reviews.
Kudos Style
Your Kudos style measures your dominant behavior in Innovation Central events. Just as “actions speak louder than words.” it’s what you do that counts.
Level K1
Most people are at level K1, because in fact most people do little more than read others’ ideas. Active participation (by entering your own ideas, or commenting and connecting to others) is the only way beyond K1.
Level K2
People at K2 participate at a modest level or do so very late in an event, which gives others too little time to build on their ideas (and thereby raise the Kudos of both). To rise above K2 usually requires more diverse participation (ideas, comments, voting) and more thoughtful, complete, or even controversial writing. Innovation thrives on the new and unexpected, so do others’ actions which contribute to Kudos.
Level K3
As a K3 contributor you are among the most engaged, not only by how much you do but by how much others build upon it. Keep it up! But you can’t stand still, because Kudos is a relative scale and if others participate strongly they can reduce your level.
Level K4
K4 is a rare pinnacle, the top few percent who contribute both in quantity and quality as judged by peers and review teams. Don’t be surprised if your K4 level brings you to the attention of sponsors who prize highly engaged people for future projects.
Observer Style
Observers tend to read others’ ideas and comments rather than get actively involved.
Evaluator Style
Evaluators generally read others’ ideas and comments and then rate them (either by 5-star votes or Bubble Up). They do not express themselves much in original ideas or comments.
Builder Style
Builders are strong and frequent commenters on other ideas. Their encouraging and helpful style often makes a big difference in how rich ideas become and how much attention they get from reviewers and sponsors.
Creator Style
Creators are idea people. They prefer to enter new, original ideas, and may actually read or comment very little on others. Many creators are busy experts who are happy to contribute in a quick and to-the-point way.
Collaborator Style
Collaborators do it all: they contribute ideas, they build on others with comments and votes, they bring others into the discussion by sending links. This is the most sought-after style by event sponsors.
Kudos levels for people and ideas are relative; there are fixed percentages allocated to K1 through K4. This is done to assure fairness and consistency (so one Challenge can’t have all K4’s and another all K1’s) and also to encourage contribution over time. You might be a K3 today, but if you do nothing for a while other people will accumulate ideas, comments, reviews, etc., and may knock you down to K2, relative to them now.
Kudos levels for ideas are Challenge-based, so they are relative within that event and will not change after the event is closed.