When Diane Fountain, senior director of Human Resources for the University of Iowa’s College of Engineering, sent her colleague Hilary Jensen a Hawkeye High-Five in November, she said the process only took her around 30 seconds. She said the ease of the tool is what makes the university’s newest peer-to-peer recognition program so effective.
“It’s really nice to be able to recognize peers and colleagues,” Fountain said. “Supervisors have several mechanisms to be able to recognize their employees, but this is a way for an all-hands-on-deck approach. Anytime anybody sees anything, they can take the initiative to recognize someone in a very simple way. And I think sometimes those mean the most to people.”
The Hawkeye High-Fives program, launched this fall by the university’s human resources department, is a simple form that allows anyone with a HawkID to send a brief thank-you, note of appreciation, or work-related shout-out to anyone on campus. Although the university has offered formal awards for a long time, Fountain said this is a step in the right direction for informal recognition.
“It’s great to be publicly recognized, but [Hawkeye High-Fives] are for the unsung heroes, the people who every day are just doing their best to make sure things get done and get taken care of in the right way,” Fountain said. “So this makes recognition feel more, I’m going to say, complete.”
Senior Director of Strategic Communication for UI Human Resources Justin Fraase served on the committee that designed Hawkeye High-Fives, which included members from Human Resources, UI Health Care, UI Facilities and Operations, and the UI College of Education. He said the tool’s simplicity was a deliberate design choice.
“We started by looking at what was already out there, not only on campus, but also across our peer institutions, such as the Big Ten,” Fraase said. “We did discover that not all, but a lot of peer institutions had similar peer-to-peer recognition tools that, for lack of better words, were just really seamless and easy to use.”
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The committee began meeting in fall 2024, and even though Fraase said everyone agreed recognition mattered, deciding how to enhance recognition programs across campus took time.
“We wanted to try to get together to figure out what we can do to enhance, potentially improve, recognition across campus,” Fraase said. “We spent a fair amount of time really trying to define what recognition is, because it’s a broad topic. So, we took probably two or three months just to really narrow it in on that focus.”
Fraase said according to data collected by UI Human Resources, it only takes an average of three minutes to fill out and send the Hawkeye High-Five form. The department hit 700 submissions since launching in late September.
Abigail Schaver, employee experience specialist for HR, also worked with the committee to design the program, and said it was exciting to return from maternity leave and see the faculty was actually using the product of the committee’s hard work.
“When you’re trying to improve the employee experience, it’s really about creating opportunities and touchpoints to make it easy to foster that culture of recognition,” Schaver said.
She said efforts like Hawkeye High-Fives help keep that smaller-scale recognition visible.
“It also just continues to bring that awareness that it is an important piece to employee well-being, and just helps people feel good about what they’re doing here at Iowa,” she said.
Fraase said university HR has partnered with various UI organizations, including the Staff Council and the Office of Strategic Communication, which runs the UI news webpage Iowa Now, to publicize the program. Metrics data show over half of the visitors to Iowa Now’s publication of the Hawkeye High-Five program stay on the page and engage with the content.
The department is also able to offer print opportunities, so recipients of Hawkeye High-Fives can print their shout-out and hang it on their wall, as Fraase has done himself recently.
“I don’t look through all of them, because it’s a high number, but I do look through some of them, and it really is heartwarming to see some of the messages that are sent,” Fraase said. “Even if [the program] doesn’t get promoted far and wide, just knowing that somebody who made an impact received that, I think that is what we as a committee were hoping to achieve, and that puts a smile on my face.”