Introducing Shoutouts: Employee Recognition for EOS Companies

Why should EOS companies care about employee recognition? Many reasons, but let’s start with the Pure EOS reason: recognition is the best way to transform your Core Values from something living in your V/TO into something your team does every day. Every company running on EOS can recite its core values (or at least, they should be able to!). For a lot of teams, those values are painted on a conference-room wall and read aloud once a quarter, and the rest of the time they sit there looking nice.

That always struck us as a missed opportunity. EOS asks you to hire, fire, review, reward, and recognize your people by your core values. The hiring and reviewing parts have structure. The recognition part has usually been left to chance — a kind word in a meeting, a message in a chat channel, a Headline you acknowledge and then never see again. 

So we built Shoutouts: a way to recognize the people you work with, tag the core value they’re living, and have it show up right inside the software you already run your business on. It’s the newest part of our Engagement driver, and we’ve been sending them across our own team since the day it shipped. Here’s why we made it, and how it works.

Engagement is slipping, and recognition is the lever most teams skip

Engagement isn’t in a great place right now. Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace put global employee engagement at 20% in 2025 — its lowest point since 2020 — and estimated the cost of that disengagement at around $10 trillion in lost productivity.

Recognition is one of the most direct and least expensive ways to move that number, and most teams underuse it. Gallup found that only 22% of employees say they get the right amount of recognition for the work they do. The payoff for closing that gap is real: in research from Workhuman and Gallup that tracked employees over two years, people who received high-quality recognition were 45% less likely to have left their jobs.

You already know recognition matters — a sincere “thank you” goes a long way, and you don’t need a study to tell you that. What’s been missing is a way to do it that’s connected to your Core Values, and the rest of your business operating system.

Why recognition tools don’t stick for EOS teams

When we looked hard at the employee recognition options out there, the same three problems kept coming up.

The first is that recognition usually lives in a separate app. It’s one more login, one more thing to roll out, one more place your team has to remember to go. For a leadership team already fighting software sprawl, adding a sixth tool to solve a culture problem is a hard sell.

The second is that the recognition isn’t measured alongside anything else in EOS. Your core values, your People Analyzer, and your right person / right seat conversations all live in one place (your EOS software), and the kudos feed lives somewhere else entirely. The two never talk to each other.

The third is that it’s disconnected from what integrators actually run. The 1:1, the quarterly review, the People Analyzer session — those are exactly the moments where documented/reports on recognition would be most useful, and a standalone app has no easy way to put it there.

Then there’s the chat-channel problem, which I’ll come back to because we lived it ourselves: recognition posted in a team chat scrolls up and out of view by lunch, and whether someone gets seen at all comes down to who happened to be online to react.

Here’s how the recognition landscape breaks down for EOS leaders. Every claim below traces to each platform’s own published documentation.

A fair note on that last column: standalone recognition tools are genuinely good at recognition. People absolutely love using tools like HeyTaco, Kudos, and Bonusly. Many tag praise to core values, run leaderboards, and offer points and gift cards. What they can’t do is connect any of it to the operating system your company runs on — which, as it turns out, is the whole point.

How Shoutouts works for an individual, a team, and the whole company

Sending a Shoutout starts wherever you already are. Pull up a teammate’s profile, choose the people you want to recognize, tag the core value they’re living, and add a note about what they did. That’s the whole motion — a few seconds, and it’s done.

From there, you decide who sees it. Keep it inside your team when the moment is team-specific, or share it to the company feed, where it’s visible to everyone by default and people can react and comment the way they would on any good news.

At the company level, the reporting is where it gets interesting for integrators. You can see total Shoutouts over time, a breakdown of which core values are showing up most, and leaderboards for who’s being recognized and who’s doing the recognizing. It gives you a read on your culture that most teams have never had in actual numbers.

And because it lives in Strety, it shows up where your team already works. Add a Shoutouts view to your 1:1 agendas so you walk into the conversation already knowing what someone’s been recognized for. Put the leaderboard up in your weekly meeting. Bring recognition into a performance review instead of reconstructing the last six months from memory.

Engagement in Strety makes EOS easier to adopt

This is the part we care about most, because it gets at something every EOS team eventually runs into.

Ask anyone who’s rolled out EOS where the bottleneck is to a great implementation, and you’ll usually hear the same answer: adoption. The framework is sound and the tools work. Getting your whole team into the EOS framework and the supporting software every week, consistently, week after week — that’s the real work, and it’s where a lot of implementations stall.

Recognition helps with that more than you’d expect. Most of EOS is disciplined work: updating Rocks, filling in the Scorecard, prepping for the L10. Shoutouts in Strety is the rare part of the system people open on their own, because sending and receiving recognition feels good. It’s a reason to be in the EOS software that has nothing to do with being told to be in the software.

And once someone’s in Strety to send a Shoutout, everything else is right there. Their Rocks, their To-Dos, the Scorecard, this week’s meeting prep — all a click away. The part of the system people enjoy ends up carrying the parts that take discipline, and engagement turns into adoption almost on its own.

Tagging recognition to your Core Values does something similar for the People side of EOS. Your values are no longer a quarterly People Analyzer exercise that only Leadership engages with. When you use Shoutouts, your Core Values start showing up every day. Your team sees, in real and specific examples, what “right person” actually looks like. That’s how core values become a daily habit people can point to.

A standalone recognition app can lift engagement, but as far as adoption, only really drives adoption of that app, not EOS. When recognition lives in your EOS software like it does in Strety, that same energy pulls people into the operating system you want them in every week. Engagement, adoption, and traction start to feed each other.

What changed when we started using it ourselves

For a long time, our team did shoutouts in a company chat channel, in Strety Messages, or as Headlines in our L10 meetings. Someone would post a nice message, a few people would react, and then it would scroll out of sight within the hour. Visibility was pretty inconsistent, and we often weren’t explicit about the core values we were shouting out — these recognitions were more along the lines of “great work, thank you!” 

Since Shoutouts went live, all of that moved into one centralized place in Strety. Recognition is tied to our actual profiles, it shows up in our reporting, and the leaderboard has added a genuinely fun bit of friendly competition to the week. 🎉 People send more of them, more consistently, and the good ones don’t disappear an hour later. Plus, you can create a Headline for a shoutout if you want to reiterate it in your L10, or create a To Do or Issue if your Shoutout brings up a good starting point for a discussion or action item.

The part I didn’t fully expect was how addictive it is to recognize people. I am so grateful to every person on the team, and now I can shout them out in a way that feels truly meaningful. Plus, seeing me and our Head of Engineering neck and neck on the “Shoutouts given” leaderboard is great encouragement to use my too-competitive impulses for good, aka recognizing the team I love. We were already in Strety for the operational work, and now there’s a reason to open it that everyone truly enjoys — which reinforced the daily habit we’d been working to build anyway.

Turning Shoutouts on

Shoutouts is on by default, so your team can start recognizing each other right away. If you ever want to adjust it, you’ll find the toggle under Admin → Advanced Features.

But my advice? Keep it on! Don’t be a recognition grinch 🙂 

Frequently asked questions

What is Shoutouts in Strety? Shoutouts is a recognition tool built into Strety. You recognize a teammate, tag the core value they’re living, add a note, and choose whether it stays in your team or goes company-wide.

How is it different from a standalone recognition app? Shoutouts lives inside the software you already run EOS on, right next to your Rocks, Scorecard, People Analyzer, 1:1s, and reviews — so recognition connects to the rest of your operating system instead of sitting in a separate feed.

Can I tie recognition to our core values? Yes. Every Shoutout is tagged to the core values you’ve defined, and your reports show which values are showing up across the company.

Does it work for both small and large teams? Yes. Teams of all sizes get a full company feed, reporting, and leaderboards. And teams of all sizes should have a recognition motion!

Is recognition public or private? That’s your call on each Shoutout. Keep it within your team, or share it to the company feed, where it’s visible to everyone by default.

Does it connect to 1:1s and performance reviews? Yes. You can bring Shoutouts into your 1:1 agendas and add a Shoutouts view to review forms, so recognition becomes part of those conversations.

Can I turn it off? Yes. Shoutouts is on by default and can be toggled under Admin → Advanced Features.

Give it a try this week

Recognition is one of the most reliable ways to lift engagement, and it works best when it lives where the work already happens. That’s also what makes the rest of EOS easier — when your team is in Strety for the part they enjoy, the disciplined parts come along with them.

If you’re running on EOS, turn Shoutouts on and send one to someone who’s been living a core value. It takes about ten seconds, and it’s the quickest way to see the whole thing in motion.

Try Shoutouts in Strety — free for 30 days.