A simple setup to create a culture of recognition remotely in under 24 hours

Nicholas Li
Government Digital Services, Singapore
3 min readJul 1, 2021

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TLDR; Forms: Google Forms, Back-end: Googlesheets from google forms results and Front-end Peer Recognition Dashboard: Data Studio.

With the onset of COVID-19 and the reported higher rate of burnout experienced by employees that comes with WFH (Work From Home) and lack of engagement with peers, it is increasingly important to provide moral support and recognition to our colleagues and peers working hard alongside us.

But firstly you may ask, what is employee recognition and why does it matter?

Employee recognition is a way of letting their employees/colleagues know their contributions are recognised and appreciated. Employees want to know how they are doing and recognising employees demonstrates what success looks like. Companies recognise employees for going above and beyond, for their achievements, tenure or service, or desired behaviours.

Beyond a certain monetary compensation, we as humans still crave for positive affirmation and sense of belonging.

Employee recognition helps to:

  • Retain top talent
  • Increase employee engagement
  • Encourage high performance

So… spurred on by our resident fatherly figure Tech Lead, Quy, who recognised the effort of some of our Production team members who are quietly and patiently working hard to keep the Business Grants Portal lights on, we thought of creating a platform to recognise our peers’ effort.

With the help of our friendly, free-to-use Google Infrastructure, we managed to spin up a pretty fun peer recognition platform that is free, no-code, easy to maintain, server-less and scalable in less than 24 hours.

Say bye bye to those pay-to-use recognition boards online!

Google form (took 10 minutes to create)

Backend(0 time):

Auto-created with the forms

Dashboard (you might need more time for design and formatting) Integration with google dataset should take you around 2–3 hours. Data Studio has a built-in connector to google sheets.

Datastudio dashboard. Only downside is 15 Minutes refresh time

Aside from striving towards OKRs, it has been a heartening experience so far to see team members giving timely taps on the shoulders for going above and beyond!

Hope this post inspires more teams to try this out, if you are looking at remote ways to improve team engagement and employee recognition.

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Nicholas Li
Government Digital Services, Singapore

I enjoy agile ways of working, especially the more humanistic side of it.