The Motley Fool alumni, Doug Dosberg, built HeyTaco in 2016 as an innovative tool for sharing employee rewards and recognition. The goal was to create a fun and enjoyable work environment where employees would feel appreciated by moving away from the usual top-down employee engagement models.
HeyTaco works closely with conversational platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, as these become the common “hang hangouts for employees in the virtual world. HeyTaco allows users to leverage these channels for sharing recognition in Tacos, which are like claps and reward points.
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HeyTaco is a top-rated HR and team culture app on the Slack marketplace, and it recently became available for Microsoft Teams users.
Besides rewards and recognition, HeyTaco has gamification capabilities to highlight the most active reward givers and winners. Startup culture and remote workforce requirements are breaking down red tape around office celebrations and any politics around highlighting a co-worker’s achievements. Instead, employees can have fun “bragging” about their team’s accomplishments and convert peer recognition into actual rewards.
Let us review the HeyTaco integration for Microsoft Teams in more detail.
Inside HeyTaco for Microsoft Teams
Startups, companies and organisations can download the HeyTaco integration from Microsoft AppSource. Remember that while a 30-day free trial is available, users will have to upgrade to a $3 per user per month paid version after the first month. We were happy to see that HeyTaco doesn’t require credit card information for the trial period, which means users can download the app and start immediately.
Here is a quick review of its key features:
- HeyTaco bot for peer recognition: This is the flagship capability offered by the HeyTaco app. It facilitates employees with a friendly and intuitive chatbot that they can use to appreciate their colleagues and co-workers. The bot also acts as their notifications hub, alerting them whenever someone receives a recognition.
- Recognition leaderboard: One of the critical advantages of using HeyTaco is that it takes a gamified approach to employee recognition and engagement. Depending on how many Tacos/rewards employees share across a given period, employees’ ranking on a dynamic leaderboard will keep changing.
- Tacos as currency for earning rewards: The fundamental value proposition of HeyTaco is that it uses tacos as currency instead of the usual (and rather dull) points or star-based system. And tacos exist in their hierarchy, with additional recognitions like Super Tacos and Jalapeno Sauce for exceptional achievements. Employees can reimburse these later for rewards.
- Built-in reward catalogue: Recognitions collected via Teams can be converted into rewards using the app’s built-in and configurable catalogue. Employees can have experiential rewards like an early day off, an in-house party, and gift vouchers to popular apps and e-commerce stores.
- #Hashtags for emphasising values: This is an essential element of the HeyTaco app, elevating it to the position of a corporate culture enabler rather than a simple rewards & recognition tool. Employers can associate every recognition with a Taco Tag: company values like #excellence and #customer-centricity, project tags like #testing and #marketing, or anything else they wish. Tags help employers monitor exceptional achievements in each cooperation and corporate culture category, and the Taco platform will list the top performers for each tag. Tag titles get their page for further analytics.
Why the HeyTaco App Makes a Difference
HeyTaco has a refreshingly fun take on culture, engagement, and employee rewards. When Slack and Teams first entered the collaboration market, the ability to send and react to emojis was a part of their fundamental value proposition, completely changing how we look at professional communication. HeyTaco builds on this premise, turning the language of emojis into a mode of appreciation and community building. For this reason, it has found widespread adoption among small companies, mid-sized enterprises, and large organisations alike.
What We Think
Companies that want to re-energise their employee engagement activities in remote work should try out HeyTaco. It has a nifty set of features, excellent support, flexible payment, and seamless integration with Teams – download the app here.
