Why nobody is scored, ranked or nudged
Big Ups runs on five values. Here is what each one means to us, and what we chose not to build because of it.
We built Big Ups for workplaces where people notice each other's work and say so. That habit is easy to damage and slow to rebuild, so we hold ourselves to a few beliefs about what recognition should be.
Culture over Competition
Big Ups builds connection, and never gives anyone a reason to compete.
Recognition is how people tell each other they were seen. We want it to be something a team shares, not something anybody wins. The moment thanks becomes a contest, people start watching the scoreboard instead of each other, and nobody should ever have a reason to hoard it or chase it.
Left out on purpose
- Leaderboards
- Points, badges and virtual currency
- A rewards catalog to spend recognition on
Feels Good
Every moment in Big Ups should feel as good as possible. Negative moments should be avoided unless strictly necessary.
Being recognized should be one of the best moments in somebody's week, and nothing around it should take that away. We would rather leave something out than build a feature that makes a person feel behind, forgotten or judged.
Left out on purpose
- Streaks you can break
- Reminders to use Big Ups more
Honest and Fair
We never lie, and we treat everyone as equally important: the people using Big Ups, the people considering it, and the people running it.
Recognition runs on trust, so we cannot ask for it while cutting corners ourselves. The person sending thanks, the person receiving it, the team still deciding whether to try us and the person paying the bill all deserve the truth, and all of them matter equally to us. When their needs pull in different directions, we look for the answer that is fair to every one of them.
Left out on purpose
- Secret admin leaderboards or individual rankings
- Hidden pricing, or annual rates disguised as monthly
- Selling your team's data, or advertising trackers inside the product
Genuine Feedback Only
We never write feedback or prompt suggested text. All feedback is uncompelled and written by a human being.
A thank you only means something if it comes from a real place. Recognition that comes from the realities of day to day work will always have more impact than "You're doing great!". The words in a big up belong to the person who chose to write them and they were always written because the person wanted to do so.
Left out on purpose
- Message templates and suggested openers
- AI-written or AI-completed recognition
- Nudges to recognize a particular person
- Bots that post recognition in anyone's name
- Prompts to recognize somebody when a deploy ships or an anniversary comes around
Aggregate over Individual
Analytics always look at the whole organization and never compare individuals or teams.
Leaders should be able to see whether recognition is taking root and where a little encouragement would help. They should never be able to use it to judge a person or rank one team against another. Thanks that is freely given stops feeling free the moment it becomes a performance number.
Left out on purpose
- A table of numbers per person, for admins or anyone else
- Team participation ranked against other teams
- A ranking of who received the fewest big ups
What the research does and does not say
We did not make these choices because a study proved that rankings always fail. The most rigorous study we have found, a field experiment, saw performance rise when only the best performers were thanked publicly. A large review of mostly lab experiments did find that praise delivered as pressure lowered people's own motivation, compared with praise that simply told them how they were doing.
So the values above are our choices, made for the kind of workplace we want Big Ups to help build.
Sources: Bradler, Dur, Neckermann and Non, Employee Recognition and Performance: A Field Experiment, Management Science (2016), a randomized experiment with more than 300 people hired for three hours of paid data entry at a German research institute, where only the best performers in each group were thanked publicly with a card. Read the working paper. Deci, Koestner and Ryan, A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation, Psychological Bulletin (1999), a review of 128 experiments, mostly in labs with children and college students. Its finding on praise delivered as pressure comes from 4 of those studies and is about the tone of praise, not points or leaderboards. Read the review.
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