Karma is one of the most popular employees appreciation and recognition system on MS Teams marketplace. It works seamlessly with Microsoft Teams. Today, the lack of recognition is one of the main reasons why people leave their jobs. With the remote work on the rise and millions of young adults joining the workforce – the problem is real.
Recent Gallup Research on Millennial Engagement shows that every out of four Millennials on your team, three will leave in less than 2 years and two would say the reason for that: the lack of appreciation.
The team at Karma HQ keeps shipping new features and improvements. Recently, we have released a few crucial updates for Karma for Microsoft Teams The current version is 1.4.5. Here are some of the new features we are introducing today:
Rewards system
It feels good to give and receive karma. Karma goes beyond recognition. The bot offers the unique ability to convert virtual kudos points into the actual, customizable real-life perks rewards. Any teams can set up its bespoke system of rewards that matter to the individuals.
Consider the following scenario. An employee, Zachary, receives appreciation and a Karma coin that he now can spend at our Rewards store. He simply redeems the Amazon Gift card from the store.
- Feel like a little extra $20 Apple iTunes card? Done.
- Perhaps an extra-large pepperoni pizza? Get it today.
- Keen to get a new book or an extra day off work? Not a problem.
Administrators can set rewards with a few clicks in Settings.
Employees can redeem them as soon as they have enough Karma coins. No need to involve the manager: Zachary is in charge of his own perks.
Department mode
Until now, Karma for MS Teams was only available at the organization level: the only way to use it was to install the bot company-wide. This not always worked well for larger organizations (500+ people). Big companies usually have well-developed structure and a few sub-teams across several departments. Sometimes they are compartmentalised and somewhat disconnected from one another. We were looking for an easy option to run Karma at a department level only.
Utilising the latest Microsoft Teams’ features we came up with Department mode. It allows companies to install Karma per team. Each installation and its data is encapsulated within the individual department: each has its own leaderboard, rewards, company values and most importantly – billing.
(Un)limited Karma
To make Karma Rewards slightly better we introduced “Karma limits”. Two limits can be applied:
- per karma request
- per period of time
The first one sets the maximum karma that could be given in a single request. The latter defines a pool of karma for a certain time period (week, month or quarter).
Using these simple rules, the admins can ensure fair karma distribution. This also helps to price rewards more accurately.
++ operator is no longer required on MS Teams
Finally, we decided that “++” no longer need to be mandatory to give out a single appreciation. Just type @username @karma description to give one karma point. Nice and easy. “++” is still required if you intend to give more than one point.
Bonus: Dashboard update
The new flash Dasboard is also ready to go. Enjoy!
Please feel free to reach out and request a feature.
Karma customers love it
People love our product.
“Working with Karma bot has drastically helped to improve recognition at Mission. We are a company that greatly values work-life balance so we support a remote workforce, whether that’s 100% remote or from time to time as needed.” – Karoline Saffi, Vice President at People & Culture, Mission
“As a knowledge organization, culture and values are our main asset. We are continuously looking for ways to reinforce them. Karma bot gives us an opportunity to express our values in a very positive and ad-hoc way. It has significantly improved our direct feedback culture and interaction between each other. The tool is super easy to integrate and use and has all the relevant functionalities. What surprised me most was the extreme responsiveness of the karma bot team. We were struggling with one aspect of the tool and the team reacted with lightning speed to introduce a small functionality change to solve our problem.” – Daniel Nowack, Managing Director, Creating Flying Societies, Yanus Social Business
The Very Real Cost of Your Team Appreciation and Recognition