Networks of Gratitude: Structures of Thanks and User Expectations in Workplace Appreciation Systems

Appreciation systems—platforms for users to exchange thanks and praise—are becoming common in the workplace, where employees share appreciation, managers are notified, and aggregate scores are sometimes made visible. Who do people thank on these systems, and what do they expect from each other and their managers? After introducing the design affordances of 13 appreciation systems, we discuss a system we call Gratia, in use at a large multinational company for over four years. Using logs of 422,000 appreciation messages and user surveys, we explore the social dynamics of use and ask if use of the system addresses the recognition problem. We find that while thanks is mostly exchanged among employees at the same level and different parts of the company, addressing the recognition problem, managers do not always act on that recognition in ways that employees expect. Appreciation systems —a genre of messaging and microblogging systems that mediate digital expressions of appreciation in the workplace, have become widely adopted in recent years. 35% of companies used some form of online peer recognition system in 2015, an approach that was overtaking top-down recognition efforts (Lahey 2015). Since these systems track appreciation between workers and produce reports for managers, they also delegate parts of employee evaluation to a wider peer network. Examples of appreciation systems include KudosNow (Short 2011), which mediates exchanges of peer thanks online, aggregating that appreciation to produce performance reports that support managerial decisions. On Yammer, an enterprise social networking system (SNS), employees can “praise” each other, incrementing a per-employee praise count (yammer 2011). The peer bonus system Bonus.ly gives employees a monthly budget to reward the colleagues who they appreciate (Naziri 2013). Other systems display interpersonal appreciation and group metrics on screens and artwork in physical workplaces (Yoon 2013; Munson, Rosengren, and Resnick 2011). By design, the thanks, bonuses, or praise sent on these systems are personal exchanges that also reach wider audiences: the receiver’s manager, the sender’s manager, and sometimes others in the company (where profiles, reports or public displays are involved). While the recipient sees an Copyright c © 2016, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. individual message of appreciation, a manager might see recent appreciation sent or received by her team, and an executive might see aggregate reports of praise or thankfulness across teams. The design of these reports implies an expectation that they can support decisions about feedback, promotion, team composition, and team well-being. In this paper, we identify two fundamental questions for understanding the use of any appreciation system in the workplace: (a) who do users thank, and (b) what outcomes do users expect from participation? By considering the structure of who users thank, we can evaluate rhetoric from designers that appreciation systems mediate relationships across company hierarchies, as well as concerns that these systems merely offer “democratized kissing up” (Jurgen 2015). In one possibility, thanks might be primarily sent from managers to subordinates, reproducing hierarchical structures of feedback that the appreciation system was designed to supplement. Alternatively, employees could “thank up” to managers to signal indebtedness and perhaps gain favor or “thank across” the company hierarchy, either to their immediate peers or to others elsewhere in the organizational hierarchy. What do users expect from participation? A thanks message may signal expectations from the parties exchanging thanks, as well as expectations of the managers who have access to reports on employee appreciation. For example, when thanking someone through an appreciation system, the sender may expect the receiver of thanks to feel appreciated while also expecting the receiver’s manager to account for the message in an upcoming performance review. Manager involvement or even the anticipation of manager involvement may affect this interpersonal exchange. On the other hand, lack of manager attention is also cited as a major problem for these appreciation systems (Lahey 2015). To answer these questions, we situate appreciation systems within related research, then describe the genre of appreciation systems, their design rhetoric, and major affordances across 13 systems. We then contribute a case study of over 422,000 thanks records over four years in the Gratia appreciation system, a system designed by employees of a large multinational company and widely adopted throughout the company. We answer questions on who users thank with descriptive statistics and network analysis of thanks between users, comparing its structure to the organizational hierarchy. We answer questions about what users expect with content analysis of system logs and surveys of appreciation senders, receivers, and managers.