学会誌

The thanks-card is used to breed “the feeling of thanks” and “culture to praise” between employees mainly in big companies. It is one of the prevailing internal communication methods for such purposes. In many organizations, simple paper cards are used for the thanks-card operation and there are many successful cases, especially in the service-industry (e.g., a hotel, a restaurant, a shop, an airline, a logistic company). However, such paper-based activities require organizational support and a dedicated team to maintain the systematic operation. Considering operating costs and workforces with paper-based message exchange, companies may hesitate to start the thanks-cad activity.
In late years, some venture companies,
including Japan, have started thanks-card service to be usable for a PC and a smart phone and provide such service as cloud service. Using such service, companies are able to introduce thanks-card operation with much less effort.
With this paper, the author reports an empirical study on effects of a smart phone-based thanks-card in a distributed small-sized shop organization, using thank-card cloud service provided by a Japanese startup. 5 restaurant-chain shops, which contain of about 15 to 40 employees in a shop, were adopted for the
study. The author measured changes of employees’ internal communication satisfaction, job satisfaction and dedication, one of the 3 workengagement concepts, before and after the smart-phone thanks-card operation. As a result, employees’ satisfaction of horizontal communication and job satisfaction were improved after the 2.5-month thanks-card operation. Analyzing the quantity of message and contents, practical implications to send effective messages to influence employees’ feeling were also indicated.
With limitations, the author showed practical usefulness of the smart phone-based thanks-card in a shop organization, and the future research possibilities, by expanding its operations to other industries and/or larger organizations.