The power of family kudo cards

3 years ago, Marga (our team’s agile coach at the time) offered the team to start using kudo cards. Marga is a real warrior and she’s determined to accomplish her mission: make people happy at work. Marga shared with me “Management for Hapiness” toolkit.

Kudos are part of the “Management for Happiness” toolkit. They are simple rewarding cards, that team members can use to thank, congratulate and express happiness to the other team members.

At the time, our team was partly located abroad. We had a local kudo box where we could post our kudos and remote team members were posting kudos through the kudobox application. Every couple of weeks, at the end of the team retrospective meeting, we were opening the box(es) and distributing the kudos. We all were very proud of the cards we were receiving: you could be certain that the rest of the team was appreciating your efforts ! It really had an impact on the team’s motivation (and we were all secretly counting our kudos).

2 years ago, we gave a try to the kudo cards at home, the kids created their own family kudobox and their kudo cards. From that day, during the week any family member can post a kudo card in the box and at the end of the week in our family retrospective meeting (Positive Discipline family meetings) we open the box and share the kudos.

 The “kudo moment” is now a real ceremony, each family member reads out loud its kudos and we are all very proud of getting more kudos.

Kudos is helping us to:

Increase kids’ intrinsic motivation

An “I love” kudo offered to a kid that has prepared his sport bag is empowering him to be autonomous and make him proud of being able to prepare it.

Know better what kids like

A “Thanks” kudo from a kid for “letting him inviting a friend at home” let you know that the kids really enjoys what you did and he appreciates the efforts you did to make it possible to happen.

Make all of us to be happier

Expressing gratitude make all of us being more positive, little by little we are focusing on positive attitudes instead of negative behavior and that make all of us to be happier.

Kudos are helping to develop kids friendship skill

A couple of weeks after we started using kudos at home, Lucía shared the experience at school: her class mates agreed with the teacher to have a kudo box and they call it the “Nice words box“. After a couple of months having the box, the class is very happy with the box, even isolated children are having/giving “nice words“.

The teacher is already thinking about how she will be using the box next year to keep fostering peer relationships.

And you do you want to give a try to the family kudo box?