Recognition shouldn't wait for review season. We're introducing Shoutouts — a built-in way for teammates to celebrate wins, acknowledge great work, and build a culture of appreciation in real time, right inside Baxo.

Performance isn't just about scores on a quarterly cycle. Some of the most impactful moments happen between reviews — a teammate who catches a blocker before it becomes a crisis, someone who goes above and beyond to keep a project on track, or a colleague who consistently shows up with clarity when things get messy. Shoutouts give those moments a permanent home.

Too often, great work goes unnoticed simply because there was no easy place to capture it. By the time a performance review cycle rolls around, those moments are forgotten or hard to articulate. Traditional performance management tools focus almost entirely on structured evaluations and end-of-cycle reports, leaving a massive gap in how teams recognize and reinforce great behavior in the moment. Shoutouts fill that gap by making real-time employee recognition as easy as sending a message, while building a running record of the wins that define your team's culture over time.

• Give a shoutout to any teammate directly from the Shoutouts feed. No setup, no friction — just type your message and send it. Whether someone crushed a deadline, communicated exceptionally well under pressure, or simply made your week easier, Shoutouts give you a fast and meaningful way to say so.

• Tag a skill category like Quality or Communication to connect the recognition to a specific area of performance. This creates a richer, more structured picture of how your teammates show up over time and makes it easier to see patterns when review season arrives.

• React to shoutouts with emoji to amplify recognition and let teammates know their work is being seen by more than just one person. A single shoutout can turn into a team-wide moment of appreciation in seconds.

• Leave comments to add context, share your own experience working with that person, or build on the recognition with a specific example of your own.

• See all team recognition in one feed so nothing gets buried in a Slack thread or lost in an email chain. The Shoutouts feed is a living record of the moments that matter most.

Shoutouts are visible to the whole team, creating a shared feed of recognition that builds momentum and keeps morale high between performance cycles. Over time, the Shoutouts feed becomes one of the most honest reflections of how your team actually operates — who steps up under pressure, who communicates well across functions, and who consistently makes everyone around them better.

Research consistently shows that employee recognition is one of the strongest drivers of engagement and retention. Teams that celebrate wins regularly outperform those that don't. With Shoutouts, that kind of culture isn't something you have to build manually — it's built into the platform you're already using for performance management.

This is just the beginning for Shoutouts. We have a lot more planned around how real-time recognition connects to your broader performance data over time, so that the work your team does between cycles doesn't just live in a feed — it informs how growth is measured and rewarded.