Kente Digital

Kente Digital was a 45-person digital agency with a strong culture of creativity and client delivery. By most external measures, it was a good place to work. The benefits were competitive. The work was interesting. The leadership team genuinely cared about their people.

And yet, they were losing good people. In an 18-month period, seven senior employees resigned. Exit interviews consistently flagged the same theme: 'I didn't feel recognised for my contributions.' 'My manager never told me when I was doing well.' 'The company celebrated client wins in the all-hands, but the people who actually did the work weren't mentioned.'

The HR team ran an annual engagement survey. The results confirmed what exit interviews were suggesting: on a scale of 1–10, employees rated 'I feel recognised for my work' at 4.2. The company average across all engagement questions was 7.1. Recognition was a clear outlier.

The challenge wasn't that people weren't appreciated — managers privately said they valued their teams deeply. The challenge was that appreciation wasn't being expressed in a consistent, visible, timely way. And in its absence, employees drew the most natural conclusion: their work wasn't noticed.

Kente Digital's HR lead had a clear hypothesis: the recognition gap wasn't a culture problem — it was a systems problem. The culture of appreciation existed; the infrastructure to express it consistently didn't.

They started with TimmyHR's peer shoutout system. Within the first week, they seeded the company news feed with recognition posts from the leadership team — specific, public acknowledgements of contributions that had happened the previous month. Within 10 days, employees were posting their own. Within a month, the feed had become the most-checked part of TimmyHR in their organisation.

The points-based rewards system gave the recognition programme a tangible dimension. Managers could award points for exceptional work, client commendations, and values-aligned behaviour. Employees accumulated points and redeemed them for rewards they actually wanted — giving the programme personal meaning rather than one-size-fits-all gifting.

Alongside the recognition changes, they deployed monthly pulse surveys — five questions, available on mobile, with a 94% completion rate from the first cycle. For the first time, the HR team had leading indicators of how engagement was changing, rather than waiting for exit interviews to learn what had gone wrong.

At the 90-day mark, the recognition engagement score had moved from 4.2 to 6.8. At six months, it was 8.1. Voluntary attrition in the 12 months following implementation was 40% lower than the previous 12-month period.