Inside Atlassian is a blog series that highlights our internal teams using Atlassian products in unique and creative ways. This is the first post in the series.
Employee recognition with Kudos
At Atlassian any employee can nominate a coworker for going above and beyond their job description with what’s called a Kudos.
A Kudos is a small gift such as an Amazon gift card, movie tickets, or a Kiva loan given on behalf of the nominee. Employees fill out a simple Jira Service Desk form to nominate a co-worker, which automatically creates a Jira ticket that gets assigned to the local Experience Team so they can give a gift to the appropriate employee.
How it works
To give a gift, the nominator fills out a quick form that the Experience Team created using Jira Service Desk.
Different Kudos gifts are available based on the location. For example, a gift card for Sightglass Coffee is available for SF employees, and Event Cinemas, an Australian movie theater chain, is available to employees in Sydney. These menus are easy to configure with Jira Service Desk.
Jira Service Desk is hooked up to our internal Jira instance, so all submissions turn into Jira tickets.
All forms submitted for nominees in San Francisco are automatically assigned to Shannon, who is on Rebecca’s team (this is easy to configure with Jira Service Desk). Gifts for other locations are handled by the Experience Teams in the appropriate location. Shannon has a filter set up so she can see all open Kudos.
The JQL for the filter is:
project = KUDOS AND component = “5. San Francisco” AND status != Closed
When a Kudos Jira ticket is opened, Shannon receives an email notification. She then processes the Kudos ticket, and an automatic notification is sent to the nominator (the person who originally opened the ticket) when the gift is ready to be picked up and delivered to the nominee. Once the gift has been given, the ticket can be closed and it is removed from the search filter.
Extra points
- To be more efficient, Shannon processes all Kudos once a week. She can use Jira’s bulk update feature to close all issues at once.
- To speed up the fulfillment process, Rebecca bulk orders gift cards.
- Kudos are only rejected when someone nominates themselves, or a dog (yes, that happened).
- Employees can give out up to 10 Kudos per year.
- We also have a Big Kudos when someone goes way above the call of duty. The gift is between $75-$500.
- Kudos and Big Kudos nominees are listed at our monthly all-staff meeting.