What is a shoutout at work?

A short public thank you to a colleague, in a channel or in a meeting, that names them and something they did. It is the most informal kind of recognition and, when it is specific, one of the most effective.

How do you write a good shoutout for a coworker?

One sentence for what they did, one for what it changed. Name the person. Post it where their manager and their peers will both see it. Skip the adjectives; the detail does the work.

Where does the word shoutout come from?

Radio and hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s, where a DJ or artist would give a shout out to named people listening. It moved into everyday speech as a public mention of thanks, and from there into the workplace.

Recognition glossary

Shoutout

A shoutout is a brief public acknowledgement of a colleague, usually posted in a team channel or said aloud in a meeting, that names the person and something specific they did.

A shoutout is recognition at its most casual. Casual is fine. Vague is the problem, and the two get confused.

Where the word comes from

The shout out began on the radio. A DJ giving a shout out to the night shift at a named factory, or a rapper naming a crew in a verse, was acknowledging specific people in front of everyone listening. The form was always public, always by name, and always brief. That is the version the workplace inherited, minus the hyphen and the space.

By the time it reached the office, sometime in the 2010s, the meaning had settled: a quick public mention of somebody who deserved one. It fitted chat tools well, where a channel is a room and a post is the closest thing to speaking up in it.

What separates a good one from noise

A shoutout has a cost to the audience. Twenty people read it, and if it says nothing, twenty people have spent ten seconds learning that Lena is great. If it says that Lena caught the wrong year in the pricing footer before a campaign, twenty people have learned what attention to detail looks like here and that it is noticed.

So the test is the same as for any recognition. Could this be pasted under another name? If yes, it needs one more clause. The site’s shoutout ideas are all written to pass that test, and the attention to detail messages show the same principle applied to one behaviour.

Where to give one

In a channel where the person’s manager and peers both read. Recognition that only the recipient sees is a private thank you, which is a fine thing and a different one. Recognition that only the manager sees is a report.

In meetings, at the start. A round of shoutouts at the beginning of an all-hands sets a tone that a round at the end, when everyone is reaching for the leave button, does not.

Across team lines, deliberately. A shoutout from sales to engineering, or from support to product, carries further than one within a team, because it tells the recipient that their work was visible from outside. For distributed teams this is most of what the remote team messages are for.

What it is not for

Feedback that needs a conversation, or praise the person would rather not receive in public. The public versus private page covers how to tell the difference. A shoutout is a broadcast, and the giver should be sure the recipient wants to be broadcast before pressing send.

What it looks like

At the top of the weekly all-hands, the head of product gives a shoutout to the two engineers who stayed on the incident call until 3am, and says what the customer would have woken up to otherwise.
In the team channel: “Shoutout to Lena for noticing the pricing page said 2023 in the footer. Fixed before the campaign went out.”
A sales lead posts a shoutout to a solutions engineer on a different team for joining a prospect call at twenty minutes’ notice, tagging the engineer’s manager so it lands in the right place.

Questions people ask

What is a shoutout at work?: A short public thank you to a colleague, in a channel or in a meeting, that names them and something they did. It is the most informal kind of recognition and, when it is specific, one of the most effective.
How do you write a good shoutout for a coworker?: One sentence for what they did, one for what it changed. Name the person. Post it where their manager and their peers will both see it. Skip the adjectives; the detail does the work.
Where does the word shoutout come from?: Radio and hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s, where a DJ or artist would give a shout out to named people listening. It moved into everyday speech as a public mention of thanks, and from there into the workplace.