We use something like this in my org, and Google has "kudos", but I've found that the problem is their usage is highly variable even within a medium-sized or (we're roughly 1,000.) On some teams, the average employee will have hundreds of these kudos, whereas on others, the average might be 1 or 2.
This was highlighted to me recently when someone in Slack noted that one person had ~50X the kudos of everyone else and asked how that happens... and they said "just go hang around in team X's channel, they'll give you a 'taco' any time your answer a query."
Given Google's promo system (where a committee looks at candidates from very different teams) this then means they'd have to try to normalize the data for it to be useful.
At least at Google I don't think that was their original intent - the idea was to provide a way for employees to express their gratitude away from the perf context.
I don't think they should be used for perf as they are not intended to be objective feedback.
Some roles (ops, sales) are just naturally a lot more inclined to use these kinds of systems. I generalize like that after having watched similar systems at 3 companies; you hardly ever see an engineer give a "taco" for a code review, but someone in another team might give one simply for someone knowing which room a meeting is happening in. It's hard to normalize the culture. I think peer bonuses (which usually require manager approval on one or both sides) tend to be a bit more normalized across teams.
This was highlighted to me recently when someone in Slack noted that one person had ~50X the kudos of everyone else and asked how that happens... and they said "just go hang around in team X's channel, they'll give you a 'taco' any time your answer a query."
Given Google's promo system (where a committee looks at candidates from very different teams) this then means they'd have to try to normalize the data for it to be useful.