Amplify Employee Happiness and Connection in a Positive Competitive Environment

One of the biggest fears of scaling is losing your original company culture. As you add people and projects, you need more processes to keep everything on track—but too many processes can corporatize your environment and drive people apart. Being remote adds to the challenge. If you don't actively add elements that draw people together, you risk losing the spark that attracted the right people who made your company unique.

I wasn’t going to let that happen. 

I'm a co-founder of Andiamo, a modern technology recruiting firm. After more than 18 years of business, I supported adopting a platform to connect us better and create stronger links to our company values, resulting in happier employees.

Putting a Positive Spin on Everything

Andiamo prides ourselves on being a different kind of recruiting firm. We use a data-driven approach alongside a detailed knowledge of the industry and our partners' needs to connect technology's greatest minds with the world's top companies. 

We're in a competitive industry, and there are firms where recruiters are pitted against each other. We avoided that kind of boiler-room environment from the start. Some of our employees have been with us for more than a decade. Their longevity speaks to our distinct culture of openness and honesty, which people love. 

At Andiamo, I wanted to foster a positive competitive environment, one where everything has a positive spin. I sometimes think of it like playing a game of ping pong. It's fast and you want to win, but it's still fun. And if you're up against a peer who shares your positive competitive spirit, you're always up for another round.

That positivity is an integral part of our hiring process, particularly during periods of intense growth. In the last year, we've become fully remote and doubled in size, from 100 to 200 employees. Through these transitions, we made an effort to continue the threads of personal connection that have always run through our business: starting meetings with trivia questions; a Monday Who's Who, where new team members share their hobbies and passions; Friday Snackchats, where we all answer weird questions about ourselves; and more. We also hold quarterly competitions, such as the Andiamo Summer Games. Every week during the competition, 12 teams from different areas of the organization compete for points.

Larger events like the Andiamo Summer Games are fun, but managing the points and rewards for these events was a massive headache. I manually handled everything in an Excel spreadsheet. It was time-consuming and messy, especially when it came time for people to redeem their points. We couldn't give people cash because of tax implications. I tried to create a rewards catalog on my own, but it was frustrating trying to determine what people might want. Even gift cards felt transactional and it still required manual effort to activate them and troubleshoot issues.

Strength in Simplicity

I started to look for a way to simplify and streamline employee rewards. One of the first names I heard was Bonusly because they're one of our clients. The platform checked all the boxes for automating points and rewards, and it had a feature I hadn't considered: peer recognition. This feature means it's not always on management to recognize their team. Kudos could flow up to management or across teams, too. When I discovered the opportunity for everyone to offer recognition in Bonusly, it seemed so obvious. I couldn't believe I'd never thought of that before!

Choosing Bonusly was a simple decision followed by a simple implementation. We connected it with our HRMS, performed tests, and invited employees within just three weeks. My biggest concern was the same as with any new system: Would people use it? 

I introduced Bonusly at an all-hands meeting, and I was surprised at how quickly people took to it. The platform is straightforward and user-friendly and integrates with our existing processes and systems, like Slack. All of this lowered the barriers to adoption.

There were a couple of people on the management team who were unsure about Bonusly. Would people think it was cheesy or inauthentic? That's never been the case. Sure, it's lighthearted, but it's not frivolous. Whenever someone thanks you, you feel good, and that constant positivity is exactly what we want.

How We Amplify Our Winning Moments

Once we adopted Bonusly, we automated our public recognitions. Bonusly engages new employees from day one, and the platform automatically recognizes birthdays and work anniversaries. Bonusly keeps track of everyone's points, and the Bonusly digital rewards catalog has something for everyone. People can even redeem points for charity donations, and it's amazing to see people pay their reward forward.

Bonusly has lifted an enormous burden from my shoulders. During large events like the Andiamo Games, I used to spend up to five hours a week managing points and rewards manually. Today, I spend next to no time on the process, apart from the time I spend recognizing others myself. 

Technology recruiting is extremely challenging work. Most of the time, you don't win. In this kind of climate, it's important to be surrounded by colleagues you trust who are always looking for those silver linings. Bonusly helps people find those positive angles. We have fostered an environment where there's always an opportunity to learn, and even when people don't win, they're rewarded and recognized for their efforts.

Bonusly allows us to see all of these lessons and efforts, and we also have company-wide visibility into those winning moments that would've never surfaced outside of a particular team. Bonusly has helped our organization become more connected and see moments of positivity throughout the day.

Connected Employees Are Happy Employees

We've long tracked our eNPS score, which measures employee happiness. Any eNPS score above 50 places you in the top 5% of companies. It can be hard to improve from there, but we always strive to increase our score. In the six months since adopting Bonusly, our eNPS score jumped from 72.2 to 82.1. While I can't attribute this entirely to Bonusly, adopting Bonusly is the only change we've made during that time. I've never seen a jump that big, and I think it comes down to an improvement in engagement. 

An in-office ping-pong table or a full beer fridge doesn't boost morale if you don't have the right people in the right environment. The more engaged and connected employees are to one another and the company, the happier they are. Management constantly looks for ways to foster more connections, and Bonusly makes that effortless. One day after lunch, I saw 65 Bonusly-specific recognition messages on Slack, which means a quarter of our employees were engaged—and the day wasn't over yet!

What I might love most is how creating an environment where people are encouraged to thank each other publicly gives our shyer employees a voice. These people might not feel comfortable speaking up or sharing at a meeting, but using Bonusly includes them in that activity. 

Demonstrating Our Values

Our company values are: be amazing, do the essential, have fun, adapt, have grit, and have purpose. Some companies' values exist for visibility on a website, but for Andiamo, our values actually mean something. We base our hiring decisions and performance reviews on our values and try to work them into everything we do. 

Bonusly furthers that by requiring participants to connect every recognition to at least one of our values. Employees see a continuous stream of ways their colleagues live these values in their day-to-day tasks, and examples of how they can do the same.

We launched Bonusly to make it easier to reward our employees, but we've gained so much more. Rather than worrying about losing our culture as we scale, we found a way to amplify our principles and forge deeper connections, making us stronger as an organization. We always needed Bonusly; we just didn't know it.