Sponsored by Workhuman.
In recent years, we have seen a confluence of macroeconomic trends and seismic shifts in workplace dynamics that have profoundly impacted company culture and, more specifically, the employee experience. The stress of COVID-19, The Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and the return-to-office movement have combined to alter what employees expect out of their workplace.
Because those stories are out of the headlines, they may seem to be in the rearview mirror. However, a deeper look at employee sentiment reveals a different picture.
Gallup finds that U.S. employees’ daily positive emotional experiences have only increased somewhat from the lowest points of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the percentage of employees who experience a range of negative daily emotions remains elevated relative to historical benchmarks.
High stress levels and burnout have fueled a massive change in employee expectations particularly amongst Millennial and Gen Z employees, who comprise the growing majority of the workforce. In fact, the year 2024 marked a major demographic shift across the U.S. – more Americans reached the traditional retirement age of 65 in the same year than at any time in history.
The working world is at a fulcrum, and the moment demands a different type of workplace—one centered on the employee experience.
When employees feel good about what they do and who they work with, they’re better collaborators, problem solvers, and communicators. They’re more resilient and more agile in a world that is constantly changing around them. When an entire organization of employees feels that way, the chemistry of the workplace evolves.
Any organizational change requires a system designed to facilitate it. Enter employee recognition, a companywide program where employees can reward and celebrate their colleagues by acknowledging their impact and recognizing the successful behaviors, values, and unique skills they bring to their teams and the organization.
Bottom line: This stuff isn’t warm and fuzzy. It’s the future of your bottom line.
Transform People and Business Strategies with Recognition
At the most foundational level, recognition elevates and amplifies the employee experience. It inspires employees to role-model the organization’s values and success behaviors, bringing culture to life through celebrated moments of achievement. It can also be deployed to incentivize and reward specific business objectives, such as improving productivity in a particular business unit, driving participation in an important CSR/ESG initiative, or boosting organizational upskilling in a new technology domain.
Despite the preponderance of evidence surrounding the tangible culture, people and business benefits of employee recognition, Gallup and Workhuman research shows only two in 10 senior leaders say recognition is a major strategic priority at their organization, meaning very few leaders are taking recognition seriously enough to see the benefits. The result is…no measurable impact at all.
To see real, measurable results, companies need to create cultures of recognition where praise and acknowledgement touch every level of the organization. As a gratitude-rich culture pervades an organization, companies begin to see an immediate and profoundly positive impact on employee engagement and productivity, as well as a marked reduction in other areas, such as absenteeism, safety incidents, and voluntary attrition.
At Workhuman, we call this recognition done right.
Recognition done right is what separates ordinary recognition from extraordinary recognition. It means partnering with customers to design, launch, and evolve recognition programs to meet their unique needs and solve for their most challenging pain points. It means unlocking the ultimate value of a recognition program by empowering everyone across the organization to give and receive recognition, building a culture of recognition that responds organically to the real-world work being done.
A good example of what this looks like in practice is at Cisco. Recognition has driven higher engagement overall, and more specifically, it’s helped employees lean into their strengths and paths of development and has explicitly tied employee impact to business outcomes.
Ashley Goodall, senior vice president of leadership and team intelligence at Cisco, explains how recognition’s collective impact can transform an organization. “Recognition acknowledges [people’s] strengths, which is the number one secret of high-performing teams.”
For any business, a strategy or initiative that requires active employee engagement is enhanced by a science-backed recognition platform like Social Recognition®. And all those millions of gratitude messages highlight where and how work is really happening across the organization.
The Transformative Potential of Recognition Data + AI
Recognition programs that are designed for success generate a goldmine of information-rich and authentic data. Data that can be transformed into a wealth of organizational insight, canvassing a wide range of skills, talent development, leadership, mobility, engagement, performance, and culture use cases. Recognition data is an always-on, living record of where and how work is getting done around an organization and the values, skills, potential, and performance exhibited by those doing the work.
Applying AI tools and approaches to this uniquely rich data source unlocks profound organizational insights, enabling people and business leaders to effectively access the collective knowledge of their organizations, providing accurate answers to people, culture, and business-related queries that traditional HR processes and technologies simply cannot, such as:
- Who are the cultural flag-bearers across the organization?
- Who are the biggest flight-risks in a high-potential employee cohort?
- What are the skills strengths and gaps within a specific team?
- Where and how is cross-departmental collaborative work happening?
- Who are the ideal internal candidates for specific open roles?
- What impact is recognition having on the safety profile of one manufacturing facility vs. another?
- Which early-career employees are exhibiting leadership characteristics that predict future growth as leaders in the organization?
To that end, Workhuman has developed large language models that parse those gratitude moments and return game-changing insights about a company’s people, culture, and business through a conversational GenAI interface.
We’ve trained those models with years of data-informed best practices, case studies, and deep research around employee recognition, helping our customers interrogate their recognition programs to determine what’s going well and what improvements will make an even greater impact on their people and business.
On February 26, 2025, Workhuman will launch the Human Intelligence™ 2025 Release, a groundbreaking leap forward that empowers organizations to transform their cultures and fuel business performance. It represents the latest evolution of our movement to make work more human for everyone, everywhere.
In October 2024, Workhuman debuted the new Workhuman® iQ and AI Assistant: AI tools that mine recognition data (i.e., human data) for transformative company insights. The output of these AI tools trained on data from Social Recognition® is what we call Human Intelligence™.
But the transformative power of Human Intelligence™ relies not just on data but on good data.
Having the most authentic and meaningful data in hand allows companies to solve for their most pressing pain points in employee engagement, retention and talent acquisition, AI integration and upskilling, culture and employee experience, and skills gaps/performance management.
That’s the Human Intelligence™ 2025 Release: powerful new innovations that enhance existing innovations and solve real-world challenges.
Instant Insights to Empower Teams
“We have a lot of data – but we don’t know what it means.”
“Data paralysis” is a common refrain, and it can threaten the efficacy of any recognition program. Data alone offers little insight into people dynamics, cultural health, and employee performance and skills.
Traditionally, companies have run reports, analyzed the data, and spent considerable time and energy generating actionable insights manually. Workhuman iQ and the AI Assistant offer a more effective path through generative AI being “trained” to directly pull answers from the data.
Grounded in Workhuman’s unique data set, the AI Assistant serves as your sidekick, proactively identifying the skills and development of employees throughout the organization. You can find effective problem solvers, communicators, and future innovators and leaders.
Let’s say a new hire needs a mentor with strong presentation skills. The AI Assistant, trained to analyze and interpret data from recognition messages, could produce a list of names of those across the organization who have been recognized for this very skill.
Or maybe there’s a need to identify strong performers within a given department. The AI Assistant could analyze recognition messages specific to each individual across the department and look at the quantity of those messages and the associated skills score per employee. The result would be a full picture of not only top performers but also those with strong potential.
AI is not new, especially to us. For years, Inclusion Advisor, built on natural language processing, has helped prevent moments of unintentional bias in recognition messages. Our in-house innovation lab and Workhuman iQ form the industry’s most comprehensive AI solution in HR.
The introduction of the AI Assistant takes the impact a step further, arming teams with AI-powered talent and people insights in seconds.
Final Thoughts
At the root of work is the employee experience. Quality work does not get done, deadlines are not met, progress is not seen, and a company has no resilience if the employee experience suffers. Right now, the data is clear: It’s suffering.
Fostering resilient cultures and driving sustainable business growth is as urgent as ever. Recognition encourages employees to live company values and strengthen their skills and working relationships. At scale, it inspires, engages, and propels employees and organizations toward their full potential.
An earlier version of this article appeared on Workhuman.
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