How tacos helped DTT Doing Things Together

Company culture defines the environment in which employees work. It includes a variety of elements, including work environment, company missions, values, ethics, expectations, and goals. It represents how a company cultivates business growth by offering each employee a voice, while encouraging healthy day-to-day attitudes. At DTT, we believe that a great team culture is the foundation for a real, tangible business growth.

Recognition and HeyTaco!

Many studies have highlighted the importance of recognition in the workplace. It is an essential aspect of a healthy team culture. Meaningful recognition and gestures of gratitude should be part of the management philosophy in order to retain top talents and encourage high performance.

At DTT, we were looking for a tool to encourage and facilitate recognition and employee appreciation in the workplace. The whole DTT team uses Slack on a daily basis so we thought a good idea would be to find a third-party application on Slack that we could all use to publicly celebrate employees.

HeyTaco! happened to be exactly what we were looking for!

How it works

HeyTaco! is a unique recognition platform that enables individuals to recognize each other by making it fun and rewarding. The platflorm uses tacos as a currency for appreciation.

Everyone has 5 tacos to give out per day. A taco can be given to anyone as a token of gratitude. Then, those given tacos can be used to either contribute to team goals or to redeem individual rewards.

Giving a taco is a gesture of appreciation, it’s giving back to a colleague that deserves something extra for their hard work. The rewarding system surrounding HeyTaco! has proven to be a great motivator for both teams and individuals. The team rewards set a common goal, something fun and exciting to work towards together! Finally, the taco leaderboard spices things up a bit. It creates a challenge to earn more tacos than your colleagues! By doing so, it encourages high performance and peer to peer collaboration.

Results

After 4 months using HeyTaco! everyday we saw some very interesting results. A total of 5968 tacos were given, 27 rewards were redeemed (like team lunches and nights out) and 79 (and thus almost all) employees are actively participating in the taco system!

HeyTaco! helped us improve different aspects of our team culture. First, communication and peer to peer collaboration were really impacted by this tool. We saw a big improvement regarding peer to peer collaboration from developers of different teams. Finally, HeyTaco! became an easy ice-breaker for new comers and a good topic to discuss bringing the DTT team closer together. It’s crazy what people are willing to do for tacos these days!

Plans to further improve our company culture

HeyTaco! was a first step towards our common goal to improve and consolidate our company culture. In an effort to go even further, we created a team to dedicate time and resources to continue in that direction.