current research suggests that the feeling of making constant progress and being appreciated at work are the most important motivator for people. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
It's not merely compliments.
If you need to put a service in place to remind you how "awesome" you are, you simply lack confidence. No service in the whole wide world will give you confidence - it can only, temporarily, simulate what it would be like if you had confidence. Ergo - the minute you stop having a service remind you how "awesome" you are, you will go back to wondering. If you need a service to tell your employees that they are "awesome", you are inconsiderate and emotionally dead.
Real confidence is produced through the direct exchange of appreciation between two actual humans who care about each other.
I'm rarely this scathing, but this is garbage. It's cargo cult. It's pathetic.
It also sure doesn't help that that advertisement for the project reads like those dime-a-dozen "I want to sell you something you don't need" sites. Complete with meaningless stock pictures and cliparts.
> We think people need to feel genuinely included and that's what's missing from many work environments.
Yes, I think the word they have missed in their own text is "genuine". Because this is not genuine, this is automatized, no matter how many humans you throw into the mix at any point. There is no line of genuine appreciation going from one human (the person appreciating the work) to another (the person doing the work).
To paraphrase that greenpeace saying about "can't eat money" - When the whole world is social networked and all human interaction has been successfully automatized, people may finally realize that no technology will ever convince that one part in your brain that just frigging knows whether something is genuinely human or not. Because it knows. And that's why you will always wonder until you can fully appreciate the real thing.
> [...]a real person will call your team to tell them they are valued and appreciated
"Hey, I'm calling you to tell you that the person heading your team paid a service to make sure that a human calls you to inform you that they value and appreciate your work but not in a way where they would invest their own time and emotions into it, but let me not actually put it like that and instead make it tee-hee-silly because we both know that this is somewhat strange - yeah, I know, weird, hm?"
"Only in America", I guess?