Shopify employee here - Unicorn makes accomplishments highly visible to both your boss and colleagues. The bonus is that if you do something for a colleague, your boss will find out via Unicorn rather than you having to say anything.
My concern is that not all actions are equal, but the recognition seems to be.
My question is do I get more "points" for fixing the thread dispatcher in the kernel...or do I get just as many for helping you understand how to upload a file to Sharepoint?
That's where you can disenfranchise people. However, I like the idea and to me it is a good step in implementing 360 feedback as part of a review and bonus allocation.
IMHO, combine peer feedback as an equal component of bonus allocation along with management assessment and I think then you have a winner.
"Everyone in the company sees [your] plaudits and can pile on more unicorns if they agree that [you] did an awesome job."
The only person who will be impressed by you helping Bob upload to SharePoint is Bob. Total score: 1-3 unicorns.
Every engineer will be impressed that you fixed the thread dispatcher. Total score: 1-3 unicorns * # of engineers.
I've worked Unicorn in to my daily workflow. I can't say everyone (or even anyone) else uses my system, but Unicorn is my first stop of the day when I sit down at my desk. I look over all the unicorns from the previous day, distribute points as I see fit, and move on with my day. Rinse and repeat daily.
It takes all of ~2-3 minutes out of my day. I can see how this technique wouldn't scale well once employee numbers get too big, but it seems to work well at ~100 employees.
Votes are also private, including how many votes something has received (except to the person being rewarded). I really haven't noticed any gaming of the system.
The biggest part of the reward is recognition. The money is nice, but as I said, no one is retiring based on it.
There’s an email/newsletter that’s auto-generated every few weeks that summarizes what’s going on and makes it easy to remember to spread some unicoin around.