Every shoutout is tagged with a company value. That tag does two things: it shapes how the shoutout appears in the feed, and it produces the reporting that tells you which behaviors your team actually recognizes.
Setting values up is a short task. Choosing them well is the part worth slowing down for.
⚠️ Assign icons and colors before you launch. Shoutout banners are posted to Slack and Teams as static images at the moment of sending. Any shoutout sent before you configure a value will keep the default appearance permanently, even after you assign artwork later.
Choosing your values
Use the values you already have. If your organization has published values, use those exact ones. Inventing a separate set for HiThrive creates two competing vocabularies and undermines both.
Five to seven works well. Fewer than four and the tagging carries no signal, since almost everything lands in the same bucket. More than eight and people default to whichever option appears first rather than choosing deliberately.
Write them as behaviors, not abstractions. "Excellence" is hard to tag a specific moment against. "Raises the bar" or "Owns the outcome" gives someone something to match a real action to.
Keep descriptions short and concrete. Each value shows a one-line description in the composer. That line is doing real work: it is the last thing someone reads before deciding which value fits. A description that restates the value name wastes the opportunity.
💡 If you are launching without published company values, do not let that block you. Start with four or five that describe how your team actually works, and refine them once you see which ones get used.
Adding and editing values
Navigate to Admin Panel > Recognition > Shoutouts at app.hithrive.com/admin/recognition.
Adding a new value and updating an existing one happen in the same place. For each value you will set:
Field | What it does |
|---|---|
Name | Appears in the composer dropdown and on the shoutout banner |
Description | The one-line explanation shown beneath the name in the composer |
Icon | Appears as a badge on the banner and tiled across its background |
Color | Becomes the banner background |
Assigning icons and colors
Do this before your first shoutout goes out. Banners pull their icon and color from the tagged value at the moment of sending, and the resulting image is posted to Slack or Teams as-is. Values without artwork assigned produce a default banner, and that banner stays default forever on any shoutout already sent.
Premade options. HiThrive includes a library of icons and colors. This takes a few minutes for a full set of values and looks polished immediately. If you are short on time before launch, use these rather than waiting on custom artwork.
Custom assets. Upload your own icons if you want banners to carry your brand imagery. Custom icons should be 512 x 512.
The color you assign becomes the full banner background, so choose something with enough depth that white text stays legible on top. The recipient's name sits directly on it.
Full specifications and guidance on preparing custom artwork: https://help.hithrive.com/help/customizing-your-shoutout-values
Changing values later
Names, descriptions, icons, and colors can all be updated at any time from the same screen.
Changes apply going forward only. Shoutouts already posted keep the banner they were sent with, since the image was rendered and delivered to Slack or Teams at send time. A rebrand mid-program will produce a feed with a visible before and after, which is normal and not something to work around.
Deleting a value works the same way. It is removed from the composer so nobody can tag it again, and previously sent shoutouts are unaffected.
That said, deleting removes the value from your reporting going forward, which makes year-over-year comparison harder. If a value has simply been renamed in your broader culture work, updating the existing value preserves more continuity than deleting it and creating a new one.
Checking whether they are working
Once you have been live a few weeks, look at the distribution of values in your reporting at app.hithrive.com/admin/reports.
A healthy spread has most values getting meaningful use. Two patterns are worth acting on:
One value dominates. Usually means the others are too abstract to match real moments against, or that one value is broad enough to absorb everything. Tighten the descriptions.
A value goes unused. Either it does not describe work anyone actually does, or people cannot tell when it applies. Rewrite the description before concluding the value is wrong.