Building a Culture of Recognition: A Case Study with Insightly and HeyTaco

The Power of Recognition: Setting the Stage for HeyTaco at Insightly

Peer-to-peer recognition is a powerful tool for fostering a positive work environment and boosting team morale. Laura Freeman, the Manager of Customer Success at Insightly, understands this well. With over five years of experience using Hey Taco, she has seen firsthand how recognition can transform a workplace. 

Laura first encountered HeyTaco at a previous organization and was immediately drawn to its ability to enhance recognition and build a culture of fun. When she joined Insightly, she saw an opportunity to implement HeyTaco to benefit her team.

From Inspiration to Implementation: Laura's HeyTaco Journey

Insightly had just completed an Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS) survey learning that people were craving an opportunity to recognize each other. “We're deeply focused on our work at Insightly,” said Laura. “HeyTaco offers a chance to take a break, have some fun, and lighten the mood during the day. That's what I appreciate about HeyTaco—it's not just for recognition; it also adds a lighthearted, enjoyable element to our routine, which can be a refreshing part of the day.” With only a few months at the organization, Laura was off to the races building alignment and enthusiasm for HeyTaco.

Soft Launch to Success: How HeyTaco Took Insightly by Storm

Implementing Hey Taco at Insightly was a strategic process. Laura presented the benefits of the platform to leadership, prepared leaders for its rollout by putting together an overview of all of the benefits of HeyTaco for Insightly; not just for the individual employees, but also for the organization as a whole. Highlighting things like employee engagement and retention, as well as creating more opportunities for employees who are on a path to leadership to be recognized. Once Laura had buy-in across leadership from all departments, she prepared them for the launch by encouraging them to have taco messages ready to go, to encourage participation with the team. When the time came for everyone to start using HeyTaco at the beginning of the quarter, “People were all over it”, said Laura. “As leaders, we didn’t have to do much.” Within their first two weeks of launching HeyTaco, Insightly employees had awarded their colleagues nearly 500 tacos; far more than Laura had anticipated.

Intrinsic Value Over Rewards: The Philosophy Behind Insightly's HeyTaco Rollout

One key design decision Laura made was to focus on the intrinsic value of recognition rather than implementing a rewards store. A couple of things went into that decision, one of them being the kind of message the leadership group wanted to send when they rolled out HeyTaco to their team. 

Was it about incentivizing kindness with monetary rewards? Or was it more about acknowledging feedback and prioritizing genuine recognition? We aim to foster a culture of appreciation, so we chose to begin without financial incentives” explained Laura. 

Core Values HeyTaco Campaign: Reinforcing Company Values Through Recognition

One of Insightly's recent initiatives was the Core Values HeyTaco campaign. Each quarter, the team at Insightly focuses on one of their core values when giving tacos. By using TacoTags to highlight and reinforce Insightly's core values, they are able to create a strong connection between recognition and the company's mission and values. This campaign not only celebrates individual achievements but also emphasizes the importance of embodying the company's core values in daily work regardless of one’s functional area. Their Q1 Core Value is “Make Customers Happy,” which they are using the tag “#happycustomers to nominate their peers.

“We give tacos for our core values across the company, which brings us all together and reminds us that we're all going in the same direction and care about the same things.”

HeyTaco Across Teams: Fostering Collaboration and Gratitude at Insightly

Since its launch, HeyTaco has become an integral part of Insightly's culture. With HeyTaco living in a public channel everyone in the company can see, tacos have been helping celebrate and encourage cross-functional collaboration. Tacos are flying across teams, time zones, and states, fostering a company-wide channel and culture of gratitude. 

“It allows people to highlight how each team contributes to overall success. While we all believe our roles are crucial, having visibility into everyone's contributions to Insightly's success goes a long way." 

It’s the gratitude that is at the heart of Insightly’s culture - the habit of pausing to appreciate and be thankful for all the good things that people are doing every day. Everything else is the cherry on top.

About Insightly: 

Insightly is a modern and affordable Customer Relationship Management platform (CRM) that helps teams scale and grow. With robust customization features for great value, the Insightly platform is built to scale and easy to adopt as your business grows. With a CRM for sales management, marketing application to connect prospects with customers, a service application to deliver support to customers, as well as AppConnect, which connects every other app that you use to run your business, Insightly is the CRM of choice for thousands of customers across the globe.