Share More Feedback and Recognition with Individual Likes & Comments Per Done!

Many of you told us that you wanted to be able to give specific feedback on people’s dones, and we couldn’t have agreed more! So we’ve revamped the feedback system so that you can now add comments and likes to individual dones — on the web and through your email digests!

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These changes may seem simple, but for us, these small improvements are significant. Not only do we see this new feedback system as adding more value to our service, we see it as a key to increasing the engagement and fulfillment of our members with their work. Since we launched the individual feedback feature earlier this month, we’ve noticed some interesting trends that indicate we’re on the right track and thought we’d share some preliminary observations and hypotheses.

First off, our users have been receiving more than double the number of likes from their fellow team members!

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It’s awesome that teams are spreading such positivity since it means that more people are giving and getting recognition for their accomplishments. With this super simple way to give positive feedback, you can express a quick “Thanks!” or “Great job!” and give a virtual pat on the back. People get a nice boost of acknowledgment while feeling satisfied that their status updates aren’t being sent to a black hole.

We’ve also seen how the increase in likes isn’t due to “superlikers” getting click-happy, but an overall boost in involvement.

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The more people are able to visibly give and receive recognition for their work, shaping a work environment of support and progress, the more satisfaction they’ll find in what they do. We’re hoping that these increased likes help cultivate a positive feedback loop of greater appreciation and happier work performance.

Open communication of dones is a great opportunity to start conversations and give feedback through comments. While we were hoping to see a similar boost in the usage of comments, that hasn’t happened quite yet.

At the same time, we also see the lack of increase in comments as a positive. Before the new feedback system was put into place, the website UI was confusing especially when it came to entering your dones. People were writing down their dones in the comment box by mistake. Now, placement of the comment feature is much clearer, so we think there are fewer mistaken entries.

Overall, we’re encouraged and excited by our new individual likes and comments feature. By the end of 2012, we saw how active teams on iDoneThis shared five times as many likes and comments every day than those teams that eventually fell inactive. That visible interaction represents the kind of deeper connection we want usage of iDoneThis to encourage between employees’ engagement with each other and their work.

Dan Pink, who has written a lot about motivation and engagement at work, has pointed out the weakness of modern workplaces in communicating feedback, that “[o]ne of the key challenges of organizations today is to make the feedback that people get inside the organization as rich, relevant, and frequent as the feedback they get outside of the organization through their smartphones, games, and social networks.” 

We’re aiming to make that happen, enriching and enabling the process of providing useful, relevant, frequent, and supportive feedback. By sharing dones and comments with each other, everyone can recognize and catalyze their individual progress and the company’s collective achievement!

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