Do You Know Who Your Rock Stars Are? Giving Everyone a Voice in a Newly-Merged Company

I have strong beliefs about the value of people. I'm an extrovert, a natural encourager who seeks to build others up, improve their experience, and make them better. I'm fortunate enough that, as a business leader, I have the opportunity to apply this philosophy to the business and culture of IT.

I was one of the first hires at MyITpros, the Austin-based IT services company that I helped build. We were a team of 55 people, and I grew alongside the company: from employee to partner to primary owner and CEO. We designed our company culture around the employee experience, which we could do because I knew the employee experience firsthand.

I took my personal experience, married it with my philosophy about professional and personal development, and built that into a culture of recognition at MyITpros. At our monthly all-hands meetings, we'd have the typical finance and sales updates and also reserve 20 minutes for a "Thanks and Recognition" session, where everyone got the opportunity to recognize teammates who had done a great job. The time we spent thanking one another was so powerful, and people came to love and look forward to it. I wanted to capitalize on the impact of those sessions and incorporate gratitude and recognition into our everyday habits. 

Recognition Means Something to People

I came across Bonusly pretty early in my search for a employee recognition and rewards solution. We adopted the platform as a simple way to take our monthly 20-minute period of gratitude and spread it throughout the month. We set it up so that Bonusly points had monetary value, letting recognition recipients choose rewards from Bonusly's digital reward catalog. It makes a difference to people when they get that recognition from their peers, and platform use exploded.

Sometimes an organization's core values are nothing more than words on a website or a tagline on a wall, nothing that influences daily activity. With Bonusly, you can tie recognition to your core values, so every moment of recognition directly connects to a value hashtag, like #DoTheRightThing. Tying Bonusly to our core values made people stop and think, "What actions do I associate with our core values?" It's awesome to read through our Bonusly activity and see people thanking one another all day, every day. Bonusly helped us create a consistently positive culture, one where people are considerate, think of others, and recognize each other publicly for doing the right thing. 

Everyone was used to being in the office together, and our personal connections were another big part of our company culture. During the pandemic, we had Zoom and Teams meetings, but we didn't have the same opportunities to offer each other kudos and pats on the back. Bonusly was a bright light of connection during a dark time. 

One of the unexpected benefits of Bonusly is how it identifies the real rock stars within the company. We can see the people most often recognized by their peers—and the people getting recognition aren't always the people management expected! It's like the People's Choice Awards, seeing the company through the lens of employees. I love getting that unfiltered, democratic feedback from the team, especially since the company has grown so much that I can't know everyone personally the way I once did. 

Relying on Bonusly to Build a New Culture

After nearly 18 years, MyITpros had become a significant regional player, but there was still more room for us to grow as employees and as a company. So in late 2021, we merged with a host of other top regional IT service companies to establish Integris, the top IT services provider in the country.  

During the transition, our new CEO suggested I become Integris's Chief People Officer, partly because of the great culture we had built at MyITpros. He knew how much I care about people, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to put forth my people-first philosophy at a fast-growing national company. So I accepted—with a few caveats. If I was going to be in charge of HR at Integris, I wanted to use a specific set of tools to guide the culture of this new organization, and one of those tools was Bonusly.  

Bonusly had been such a critical system to build our culture at MyITpros—and maintain that culture in a remote environment—I knew we would need it to create a new company culture.

Merging systems and processes during an acquisition is challenging, but merging cultures and eliminating the natural silos is an even greater challenge. We were bringing together 12 highly successful companies, and everyone thought they had the secret sauce. Of those 12 companies, a handful had already used Bonusly and loved it, so there was some natural momentum behind Integris's Bonusly adoption. Still, I knew that each of our offices had their regional differences. We didn't want to eliminate these flavors, but we needed to break down the walls separating the different regions so we could operate as a single, unified company. 

The HR team at Integris did a great job rolling out Bonusly, including putting together a PowerPoint presentation and offering light training for those who hadn't used Bonusly before. Bonusly is intuitive, so the training was more about why we chose to adopt the platform and what it could do for us as a new company. HR included testimonials in the training from folks in the company who had used Bonusly before and could attest to its benefits. Adoption started slowly in the new regions, but in the months since, we've witnessed a snowball effect. Once people start giving and receiving recognition and seeing others recognized publicly, they're more likely to do the same. 93% of Integris employees gave or received Bonusly recognition at least once a month in 2022!

Growing Closer, One Recognition Post at a Time

Since we launched Bonusly at Integris four months ago, I've noticed more cross-departmental, cross-regional recognition. People from Austin, Denver, St. Paul, and Atlanta have more visibility into everyone's activities and they're giving kudos to one another. I've also seen recognition move horizontally between peers across the organization, not just up and down between managers and their reports. Seeing recognition spill out across regions and teams is a strong indication that we're building a unified culture and breaking out of our initial post-merger silos. 

One way I reinforce the importance of recognition is reading out the names of the latest Bonusly point leaders during our all-hands meetings. That keeps Bonusly front and center in people's minds. Many of our sibling companies hadn't developed a gratitude muscle the way we had at MyITpros. For people who came to Integris from those companies, adopting Bonusly was a bigger stretch, especially with all the other changes happening simultaneously. But given our high adoption rates, I think those who didn't initially understand why we adopted Bonusly now have a clearer picture of its value. 

As any company grows, it becomes easier for people to fall through the cracks. Part of my mission as Chief People Officer is to ensure that Integris empowers its people so everyone feels like they belong to a team. With more than 600 employees, I can't have a personal relationship with everyone or offer personal touches in the same manner that I once did. Bonusly allows me to give everyone at Integris a voice, the opportunity to thank someone else, and be recognized for the work they do. That's powerful data to have, and it offers a very visible, public way to see the company's progress on unification.

We're in the technology world, but we are ultimately a service business. When you treat your people well and develop consideration and empathy within your teams, you ultimately build an incredible customer experience. We're using Bonusly to come together as a company and offer a fantastic experience nationwide.