The Ultimate Coda Handbook for People & HR Teams
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The Ultimate Coda Handbook for People & HR Teams

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Rewards & recognition

Celebrating your employees has never been easier and more cost-efficient.
Employee recognition is essential for making your team feel appreciated and motivated, ultimately improving moral and retention. But it can be challenging to find structured and fun ways to give kudos, and the single-use tools built for this are often expensive and underused by your employees. At Coda, we
celebrate work anniversaries
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with a handy template that collects manager insights and writes a celebratory post using AI. We also have what we call the “
Golden Shovel
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” award; an internal celebration of employees that have done some unglamorous work that’s not part of their core job—often behind the scenes—to improve the lives of their colleagues or customers.
With Coda, you can save so much time and money by DIY-ing your own recognition tooling. You already have the information you need to celebrate and recognize your employees, and leveraging Coda reduces your spend on tooling while keeping your recognition programs flexible, personal, and efficient.

1. Celebrate work anniversaries with a personalized congratulations.

Anniversaries are worth celebrating! Coda makes it easy to send personalized congratulation notes.

Step 1: Collect some key information

You already have everything you need to celebrate your employees:
Employee name? ☑️
Start date? ☑️
Role? ☑️
Team? ☑️
With the work anniversaries template, you simply add in this data (or sync it from your HR doc) and automatically see who’s got a work anniversary coming up, and how long they’ve been at the company. Now, to get a personalized congratulatory post, simply ask the employee’s manager to fill out the short form— it’s fast on their part, and easy to request and collect on yours.
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Now you have everything to write your personalized blurb to share with the team.

Step 2. Save yourself time by getting Coda AI to write the first draft.

The best part about doing all this in Coda is that you don’t have to do it alone. With Coda AI, it’s quick and easy way to get started with a draft of your message, which you can then finesse as needed. Now, it’s ready to be shared on the employee’s work anniversary so they feel recognized and celebrated!
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Ready to create your own work anniversaries doc?

Get the template
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2. Recognize great work with the Golden Shovel awards ritual.

Anniversaries only come once a year but excellent work is eternal. Another ritual we love at Coda: Golden Shovels! These are employee-nominated awards that recognize people doing great work. We typically do them in rounds when there are enough nominations.

Step 1: Let employees nominate each other for their work.

The easiest way to collect nominations is through—you guessed it—a Coda form. Because everything in Coda is connected, form submissions end up in a centralized table that’s easy to read and organize.
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Step 2: Review and vote on nominations.

Published forms live separately from the form submission table, so the form can be public but only you (and those you give access to) can see the nominations. Once there’s a sufficient number of nominees for a round, judging can begin. Share the table with your chosen group of esteemed judges and have them vote in the Coda doc. Each judge simply follows these steps:
Push the Get Started button.
Go row by row and make your decision on whether the nomination is award-worthy.
Yes, give award
Maybe
No, do not give award
No opinion
Include any relevant notes on your decision, to help people understand why you voted the way you did.
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Step 3: Streamline the decision-making process with formulas.

Now you can use the results table to see how the judges voted. The table uses formulas to automatically look at the votes and make a recommendation, so it’s easy for the organizer to make an informed ultimate decision, or see if there’s anything that needs to be discussed further. Yay for more focused conversations!
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Curious to see how others voted? Use the “Who voted how” table to figure out where judges fall on the spectrum and have a proper discussion with the right people before making the final decision.
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Now, you’re ready to announce your winners however you’d like—maybe in your company Slack channel or email 🎉.
Create your own Golden Shovel awards doc here:

Get the Golden Shovel awards template
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Explore the rest of the People Team handbook:

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People Team hub
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Recruitment & headcount
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Onboarding
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Training & development
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Career & succession planning
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Workplace management
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Offboarding
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Performance management systems
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Compensation & benefits
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Employee engagement
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People analytics
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