"Bonusly helps us keep our culture intentional as we scale."
Intentionality is the foundation of a strong culture, and no one knows that better than Jessi Prizinsky, the Director of Operations at JS Perkins Consulting (JSPC). JSPC is a management and technology consulting firm that helps organizations navigate complexity and accelerate performance. Jessi has seen the team and culture steadily grow, and with growth comes the challenge of keeping people connected to the company’s core values.
With 65 employees across multiple locations, Jessi is focused on ensuring teams feel aligned and set up for success, no matter where they work.
Recognition has become a key part of that effort. With Bonusly, JSPC has scaled recognition to feel personal, frequent, and aligned with the company’s culture and expectations of its workers.
Recognition that reflects reality
For Jessi, recognition is a strategy for keeping employees connected.
"Having recognition live in a dedicated space has been crucial," Jessi explained. "If I think about what the alternative might be—maybe sending emails to each other—you miss out on the visibility. You're not going to send an email to the entire company every time something great happens.”
Having a dedicated space for recognition ensures essential moments aren't lost in the day-to-day grind of work. This visibility fosters a culture where achievements are consistently celebrated throughout the entire organization, reinforcing the company’s values and highlighting exceptional work. This also provides managers and leadership with a more comprehensive view of how progress is being made at the company level.
Moreover, Jessi noted that because Bonusly is fun and easy to use, adoption soars. That has two huge benefits: not only does it lead to more frequent, habit-forming recognition, but it also creates valuable insights, such as who is going above and beyond, which values are being lived out, and which teams are collaborating.
#High-performance
The alignment between recognition and company values is especially powerful thanks to JSPC’s use of Bonusly hashtags, which correspond to their core values and winning behaviors.
Jessi explained it further: "We developed something we call high-performance traits. Our senior leaders separately listed out what they thought made a high performer, and then we took all those lists and consolidated them into a final set," she said.
These high-performance traits are represented in Bonusly as hashtags, enabling the team to track and report on who is demonstrating these behaviors and creating clear examples of these traits in practice. Some key high-performance traits include “reliability,” “accountability,” and "lightening the cognitive load."
By reinforcing these high-performance behaviors through regular recognition, JSPC creates a clear path for employee growth. Team members see concrete examples of valued behaviors in action, which helps establish consistent expectations and positive reinforcement, providing a roadmap for improvement.
Leadership sets the tone
Leadership at JSPC actively participates in peer-to-peer recognition. Executives understand the importance of modeling good behavior; they frequently recognize one another, fostering alignment around the company's expectations.
"We've recognized the importance of acknowledging each other on the leadership team and calling out our good behaviors. Just because you're on the leadership team doesn't mean those bonus points aren’t meaningful. It also shows our entire company how we operate as a leadership team,” Jessi explained.
She shared an example:
"Our president and I had a difficult situation come up, and I was really impressed with how he handled it. And I thought, hey, I want everybody else to know about this. So I went into Bonusly and wrote up what that behavior meant to me, why it was impactful, and how it will help me improve as a leader and worker."
Creative ways to engage
JSPC has evolved in its use of Bonusly since implementing it in 2019. What started as simple peer recognition has expanded to include:
1. Above and beyond awards for exceptional contributions
2. Dedicated budgets for junior leads to manage
3. Contest rewards, like a business development writing competition
According to Jessi, the team has become more versatile in its use of the platform. Today, it's serving as a central pillar of the people and culture strategies.
Jessi noted that they've empowered junior leads by giving them their own Bonusly budgets to manage, encouraging those leaders to think strategically about how they build engaged, performing teams. The company’s latest addition is an incentive for time tracking, a critical but mundane task that employees must complete daily. The incentive will make it that much easier to stay compliant.
“Anyone who has never missed a day of time tracking will be entered into a surprise drawing for a huge pot of Bonusly points,” said Jessi.
A culture worth building
JSPC prides itself on a people-first culture that builds team trust, clarity, and accountability. That foundation is rooted in fairness: great work and impact should be visible and recognized across all levels of the organization.
"One word that our president always uses is meritocracy," Jessi said. "If there is something that you are capable of doing, you can come in and do it. If you don't have the skill set yet and you want to learn it, you can come to us to gain those skills."
As the company grows, ensuring everyone has a voice becomes more challenging and critical. Jessi explained that every employee at JSPC must have a “place and voice” within the company.
This intentionality is what sets the culture apart. When asked to describe JSPC’s approach to culture, Jessi repeatedly returns to one word: intention.
"I always come back to the word intention. What Bonusly allows us to do with our culture is to stay intentional. The bigger we grow, the easier it is to get sucked into that day to day. The one thing about JSPC is that everyone is always willing to help each other out. Bonusly is that tool where we can say thank you for that.”
The takeaway
For JSPC, recognition has become a strategic tool that strengthens their culture while scaling. By creating intentional moments of recognition tied directly to performance expectations, they've built a system where team members feel valued, understand their contributions, and feel connected to the mission and one another.
As Jessi puts it, Bonusly is "like a hug or a high five" in a distributed workplace, providing that essential human connection that keeps the company thriving as it grows.
