The impact of continuous recognition on rapidly growing organizations

Hood office picture with people working in the background

COMON is an independent creative consultancy company blurring the lines between strategy, technology and creativity, founded in 2001 in Lisbon, Portugal. A company that combines a large number of in-house experts with the flexibility and agility of a start-up. In 2015 they integrated Tap My Back’s software into their processes, searching for internal reinforcement, that would foster recognition and bring employees closer together.

FOUNDED

2001

HEADQUARTERS

Lisbon, Portugal

TAP MY BACK START DATE

2015

They have come a long way since being originally founded as a tech company in 2001, up until becoming one of the leading creative companies in Portugal, making and breaking things at HOOD, their custom-designed workspace in Marvila. They emerged towards a global reach, while remaining proudly a Lisbon-based company. However, with an exponential growth, some new obstacles emerge, As Ricardo Pereira, Co-Founder and Partner of COMON, explains:

When we reached a certain growth volume, we realized that we were starting to lack something that since the beginning was one of our biggest assets: our culture and the proximity between our people. So we decided to address this problem immediately by investing in Tap My Back, and since then we no longer had those internal issues. Now our employees are able to openly cheerlead and upraise each other, while our managers and leaders were able to acquire a larger and deeper vision of our company. Features, such as the employee net promoter score and tools to address feedback and soft skills, really boosted the efficiency of our collaborators and internal processes, impacting positively our growth. I can’t even begin to imagine how COMON could work without Tap My Back’s assistance.

Ricardo Pereira, Co-Founder and Partner

High usage: 78 active users, near 100% of the workforce. Each user was, on average, in a positive mood 76% of the time. The Surveys have a 78% response rate allowing COMON to understand how employees felt throughout the pandemic. Monthly, awards were allocated to employees with the most Taps.

Tap My Back’s Role in COMON’s Growth

Back in 2015, at a time when the company was growing very fast, the Management Team felt that with that fast rhythm of growth, they were losing the habit of congratulating teams for their achievements. By introducing an employee engagement software -Tap My Back – they were able to ensure the recognition of their employees’ work, while giving constructive feedback. These changes in their work habits enabled a deeper employer-employee connection and a richer understanding of one’s morale and motivation, and how to improve it.

Comon office with two girls working in the background

Currently, COMON is taking full advantage of the entire platform. The Taps feature is very useful to give quick, easy and more instantaneous feedback, allowing employees to get daily motivation, recognition, and feedback.

As for Pulse Surveys, it allows them to create their own Surveys or choose from a variety of templates and automate their launch.

They have been using this feature for various purposes, from meeting feedback to checking in on their workers, understanding how company communications affect team morale, improving their future decisions based on those learnings, know how employees feel, and manage their expectations.

After 5 years of working very closely with this software that played a key role in developing sustainable growth, a global health crisis outbreak occurred, the Covid-19 pandemic, which had a devastating impact upon businesses all around the world. This catastrophe led companies to change their work ethics and strategies, shifting millions of people to a remote environment, where the need for digital tools to keep healthy communication inside the company grew substantially. However, we did not witness any negative impact on our employee’s productivity simply due to decision making, since in 2015 we decided to incorporate Tap My Back’s software, today’s solution to these problems.

Nowadays we are proud to be a rapidly growing company with little time to adapt, that overcame a pandemic, without being vulnerable to motivation and recognition-related issues.

Less is more

Open space at the office with two colleagues talking with two bikes nearby

There are other features that make Tap My Back stand out from its competitors. With the complexity of all processes from today’s organizations, platform decentralization tends to become a headache to employees. Lower efficiency rates, loss of relevant information and confusing context for newcomers’ alignment and stabilization within the company are only some of the drastic consequences of having relevant information spread across several different platforms.

Nevertheless, Tap My Back avoids just that, by allowing multiple integrations with different platforms, such as Slack, MS Teams, Chrome, and much more, this way, we are able to enjoy every single functionality of this employee engagement software, while never leaving our main platform.

“They were even available to add a new integration if we found it was necessary, which is great for companies that have developed their own central internal platform”, says Sofia Coelho, People & Culture Specialist at COMON.

This functionality is, even more, a game-changer after the last year and a half. In only 18 months, remote work changed the way businesses handle their employees, increasing the need for digital tools to foster peer recognition and keep healthy communication inside the teams and the company. Studies show that “55% of businesses globally offer some capacity for remote work” and “99% of remote workers want to continue telecommuting in the future”, concluding the need for a direct, simple and efficient digital platform that increases employee’s productivity and internal relations.

What COMON people say about Tap My Back?

Luis Serra - Co-CEO

"Thanks to Tap My Back we have a valuable tool for employees to give each other continuous feedback. It allows a better understanding of COMON's employees through the various types of survey templates and relationships to be fomented through immediate recognition. Using this app can be useful for any organization, especially during a time when people do not see each other often and recognition feedback can be hard to communicate.".

Sofia Coelho - People & Culture

"Integrated with existing platforms. Tap My Back's integration with Slack gives us the opportunity to use it more easily, without having to exchange platforms and to share with the whole team the taps that are given.".

Inês Carvalho - Team Managing Director

"The best thing about Tap My Back is the way it helps with the critical issue of employee feedback - traditionally low in recurrence, and extremely formal, which doesn't bode well with millennials. Its simplicity is refreshing.".