Kudos’ integration with ADP, our HRIS, is critical. Once an employee is onboarded, they automatically will have access to Kudos, saving time for my team.

I love the feature of publicly praising employees. Employees can provide feedback for the rest of the organization to see when their colleagues have gone above and beyond. When a new post is published, everyone can see and celebrate them.

The option to redeem points for gifts is motivating to employees, and it's very easy to do.

My organization bought Kudos through our PEO relationship with ADP. It's an offering we chose to turn on for employees. It was meant to allow us an opportunity to reward employees publicly to increase morale and retention. We have used it for 3 years.

Employees often complain about the ways they can redeem their points. They would like more options but we cannot change that.

Additionally, when employees are ready to redeem, it can take 5-7 business days to receive their reward, which is frustrating for employees. As the HR team, we are unable to implement improvements on these items because it's controlled through Kudos and ADP.

I don't know if this is Kudos specific, but there is a lot of manual work on my team to check reviews to ensure fairness in how points are awarded so people are giving them out based on performance and not friendships.

My former company built an app in house that had similar functionality. It was designed to work on a mobile device first, so much less cumbersome than Kudos.

It also had a "shoutout" feature so you could alert the employee's manager to the feedback, which was nice.

Instead of redeeming the gifts in the platform, the HR team gave out gift cards at the end of each quarter. People liked this a lot and it was logistically easy.

You need to ensure there are controls in place to ensure equity. It takes a lot of time and effort to monitor the program so you need dedicated resources.

I would also consider if it's worth it to pay the per person cost or just use those funds towards rewards that you can give out to star players at the end of each quarter.

The real feature of Kudos is the public praise. You could replicate that in a shared communication platform like Slack or Teams and do the manual rewards.

In my experience so far, I haven't seen any evolution. Kudos has rolled out minor platform design changes but nothing notable.

Kudos is good for a very large organization with resources to manage and a large budget

I like the peer-to-peer recognition option, as well as the years of service feature that allows you to easily retrieve and recognize employees for their years of service.

The rewards option is also great because it gives you access to many types of rewards to select from when recognizing employees.

The company chose the Kudos HRIS for our recognition program to streamline employee recognition and ensure fair and consistent processes for employees. Kudos was also chosen because it pairs well with Slack, our instant messaging system.

The program operates with Slack and not multiple systems. The recognition and rewards options cannot be customized, and although there are many rewards options, they are still limited.

There are no automated options, as everything is manual, which can be time consuming.

Kudos is different because it works with instant messaging programs, is user friendly, and is easy to navigate. It also provides analytical options that are easy to understand and explain.

They should think about the employee access level, as well as its limitations when it comes to rewards options. They should also consider the pairing limitations and the fact that the program is manual.

Not all employees actively use the instant messaging option, as some find it distracting. The program can be time consuming when wanting to share with large audiences.

It has changed by providing data analytics and by increasing the volume of users it allows. It also offers quick and easy real time recognition via instant messaging.

Kudos is good for every user and large organizations where employees are not easily accessible to one another.

The ease of use to recognize on the spot is a major plus. Even with a company of around 220 employees, remembering to send flowers or a card gets to be a lot. The cost-benefit is also strong; for the standard platform, we paid around $3 per month per employee, which is minimal when you factor in the administrative burden of figuring out how to recognize employees.

The analytics were also appreciated, with a real-time dashboard showing how each campaign was performing, who was opening their gift, who wasn't, and how much the program was costing.

As a consultant, I worked with a client late last year to review their rewards and recognition program. The problem was that they were remote-first and getting together for a birthday party or group lunch was not an option, considering they were spread out across the entire eastern time zone.

They tried sending e-cards and hosting virtual happy hours but their reviews were in the tank. Their employees told leaders in their engagement survey that recognition and appreciation were not enough.

After a review of a variety of platforms, we settled on Kudos for a few reasons: ease of use, on-the-spot recognition capabilities, analytics, and pricing. It was easy to set up and quick to implement. I reached out to the company a few weeks ago and so far, it is going well.

It would be nice for the standard plan to include more features. Since we stayed on the standard plan, we didn't have as much customization as we'd like, though it did solve our problem of low administrative burden for on-the-spot recognition.

The implementation cost also seemed a bit unnecessary for a company our size, as we could have figured it out without the training.

It is a great platform for small and mid-sized businesses who need to scale employee recognition in a remote-first environment. The upfront pricing for the standard plan was also appreciated, as we didn't need to go back and forth just to get a basic idea of cost.

Overall, it is easy to use and doesn't require an IT background to get started.

Budget is key. There is not only the cost for the points and rewards, but also the cost to use the platform. A small few dollars per month may seem minor, but a company needs to budget for it.

Since this was roughly 6 months ago from implementation, I can't say how it has evolved over time.

Kudos is great for small businesses and remote companies.