What is Culture Cloud? Unpacking O.C. Tanner’s Employee Recognition Platform

For global enterprise organizations seeking to attract and retain top talent, boost engagement, and create a thriving workplace culture, Culture Cloud® by O.C. Tanner brings together recognition, rewards, and workplace culture insights into one intuitive experience.

Let’s dive into everything that’s available on O.C. Tanner’s Culture Cloud platform.

What is Culture Cloud?

O.C. Tanner’s Culture Cloud is an employee recognition software platform designed to make appreciation easy, impactful, and authentic—no matter where employees work.

Whether you’re a manager, a peer, or a leader, Culture Cloud empowers you to celebrate achievements and milestones in real time.

Culture Cloud Features

From peer-to-peer recognition to global scalability, Culture Cloud empowers your organization to weave appreciation into the fabric of everyday work.

Each feature is backed by industry leading research and employee perspectives, so you get the best, most impactful recognition experiences for your people.

Peer-to-Peer Recognition

Culture Cloud makes it easy for employees to recognize each other for everyday wins through peer-to-peer recognition tools like eCards, points, Post a Win, and Boost to amplify recognition and foster connection across teams.  

Post a Win

Post a Win in Culture Cloud empowers employees to share personal or team success stories across the organization. It creates a visible stream of accomplishments—complete with photos and stories—that increases employee engagement and celebrates both big and small victories.

Boost

Boost in Culture Cloud allows employees to amplify recognition moments by adding extra points after someone has already been recognized, deepening peer-to-peer connection and making recognition more meaningful. Built-in controls help administrators manage budgets effectively.

Award Nominations

Employees and leaders can submit award nominations for exceptional contributions through Culture Cloud, spotlighting stellar work and creating meaningful recognition moments that inspire others.

Global Award Store

The Global Award Store in Culture Cloud transforms recognition points (from awards or monetary eCards) into meaningful rewards through a global, easy-to-use online marketplace.

Employees can access the marketplace via mobile app or desktop and choose from a wide selection of trending products and experiences tailored to their interests. Organizations benefit from simple administration, consolidated reporting, and worldwide fulfillment—making recognition personal, engaging, and scalable.

If employees have their eye on an award but they are a few points away, they can buy additional points through Buy Up to cover the difference.

Career Anniversaries

Culture Cloud helps you celebrate employee milestones with personalized experiences like Yearbooks and custom awards, making career anniversaries memorable and deeply connected to company culture.  

Teammates, peers, leaders, and executives can submit personalized notes for an employee’s Yearbook™ to celebrate major career anniversaries. Available as a printed and digital experience, employees have a lasting keepsake of their important milestone, and they can select a gift from a curated catalog of awards to complete the celebration.  

Custom Awards and Swag

Partnering with O.C. Tanner’s award designers, your organization can craft unique, symbolic awards and branded swag that reflect your values and identity, turning recognition into lasting reminders of achievement and belonging.

Careerscapes

Careerscapes™, developed exclusively by O.C. Tanner, are collectible symbolic awards that mark significant achievements throughout the employee journey.

Each award features a customized background and a premium base designed to hold symbolic icons representing personal achievements, company milestones, and shared experiences. This personalized approach allows employees to build a visual story of their career while reinforcing connection to their team and the company’s purpose.

Branded Swag

Branded swag is a great gift for a variety of employee moments, including employee onboarding, life events (like a new baby), reaching a company goal, launching a product, a company anniversary, and more. O.C. Tanner’s team will partner with you to curate your branded swag experiences.

Check out even more ideas for how to use branded swag in your organization.

Multiple Stores

Culture Cloud’s Multiple Stores feature lets organizations create distinct storefronts—each with its own points bank, budget, and curated award store—for employees to use in a variety of ways.

Whether it’s a Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA), a Company Store for branded swag, Holiday and Events Stores, or a Manager Store for trophies and team awards, Multiple Stores make it easy to deliver recognition and rewards that are relevant, compliant, and aligned to business goals.

Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs)

LSAs allow employees to use their Culture Cloud recognition points on a curated selection of items focused on wellness, learning, hobbies, and more—whatever inspires them most.

Company Store

The Company Store in Culture Cloud enables employees to shop for branded gear that builds pride, belonging, and team spirit—whether it’s hats, sweatshirts, or everyday essentials.

Manager Tools

Culture Cloud equips managers and people leaders with easy-to-use recognition tools and insights to help them consistently appreciate their teams, strengthen engagement, and reinforce positive behaviors.

The “My Team” dashboard gives managers a quick look at their downline’s recognition activity—received or given—and the length of time since last recognition to understand which employees may need some appreciation (or a nudge to give to others).

The Manager Store makes it easy for leaders to order pins, certificates, collectibles, and awards for their team, all from a simple online storefront. It is a low-effort, high-impact way to share recognition across teams—especially for managers with offline teams that don’t have regular access to digital recognition tools.

Leader Broadcast is a new feature in Culture Cloud where leaders can share recognition messages with other teams, departments, or the entire company, beyond the initial recognition moment. It’s a way for leaders to showcase the great work happening on their team, ensuring recognition moments are seen, celebrated, and cascaded by leaders at scale.

Integrations

Culture Cloud integrates seamlessly with wellness programs, workplace communication tools, and over 75 different HRIS systems, enabling recognition to fit naturally into daily workflows.

Culture Cloud natively integrates with these common workplace apps (and if it isn’t on this list, our open API will integrate with your specific tools through our custom “integration as a service” model):

• HRIS Systems: Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle Cloud HCM, UKG, Oracle Peoplesoft, ADP, DayForce (Ceridian), Paychex, Paylocity

• Messaging Tools: Slack, Microsoft Teams

• Email: Microsoft Outlook, Gmail

• Document Management: Microsoft Sharepoint

• Web Browsers: Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari

• Partner Integrations: Personify Health, Zebra, CipherHealth

Dashboards and Analytics

For recognition program administrators, Culture Cloud has an entire analytics portal with robust dashboards and reporting to track recognition activity and budget, measure program success, and uncover actionable insights that improve culture and performance.

These dashboards make it easy to answer common questions around ROI and program usage, especially for senior leaders and executives that want to see the data and impact behind recognition.

Culture Cloud’s pulse survey gathers your employee’s feedback on your recognition program and compares your results to top companies. You’ll be able to identify your strengths and areas for opportunity in a single view.

You don’t need to interpret this information alone, either—your client success partners will be with you every step of the way.

AI-Enabled Recognition and Insights (Culture Intelligence™)

‍Culture Intelligence is Culture Cloud’s suite of AI-enabled insight tools, including:

• Recognition Coach: A generative AI tool that delivers in-the-moment micro-coaching to improve how employees recognize one another.

• Flight Risk Dashboard: A quick look at the number of employees at risk of leaving your organization in relation to the amount of recognition they’ve received. This allows you to recognize people before they feel critically underappreciated and reduce the costs of turnover.

• Job Transitions Dashboard: A way for admins to keep track of employee transitions and how much recognition is happening within related groups. Job transitions (like promotions, switching roles, or moving departments) are key moments to recognize and encourage employees with new responsibilities.

• My Circle: An employee-specific view that identifies all the people an employee is informally connected to within the company and recommends a relevant list of people to follow, recognize, and comment on upcoming anniversary Yearbooks.

• Smart Notifications: Personalized prompts and nudges, sent via email to employees, to encourage recognition and redemption activity.

Branding and Design

Your organization’s employee recognition program should look like you. Our Culture Cloud platform offers customizable branding and award design options, ensuring every recognition experience reflects your company’s identity and values.

Global Scalability

‍Culture Cloud enables employee recognition programs for multinational organizations with global award fulfillment, multilingual capabilities, and tools designed for diverse workforces.

In addition to global tools, O.C. Tanner has offices in 6 countries for around-the-clock support, client strategy, and local market insights and best practices.

Offline Recognition Solutions

With tools like reward code cards, QR code redemption, a mobile app, and integrations with common offline tools (like Zebra for retail workers and CipherHealth for healthcare), Culture Cloud makes recognition accessible for deskless and offline employees, ensuring everyone can participate.

Customer to Employee Recognition (Say Thanks™)

Say Thanks is Culture Cloud’s customer to employee recognition (sometimes called external recognition) solution. With this tool, your frontline workers or client-facing employees can receive recognition from the people they serve every day.

There is a 10x increase in engagement when customer-to-employee recognition is added to other forms of recognition.
‍—O.C. Tanner Institute

Quick implementation with Culture Cloud: Breakthru Beverage’s 90-day success story

‍Breakthru Beverage Group implemented Culture Cloud and achieved a quick program launch within 90 days, demonstrating that speed doesn’t mean sacrificing customization or impact.

Their story highlights how a well-executed recognition program, with an experienced recognition partner, can drive engagement and deliver measurable results in a short timeframe.

Get a behind-the-scenes look from Breakthru Beverage Group about their quick Culture Cloud rollout in our on-demand webinar.

Global employee recognition with Culture Cloud: Chevron’s 100-year journey

Chevron partnered with O.C. Tanner to unify its fragmented recognition programs into a single global platform powered by Culture Cloud. The solution introduced digital tools like eCards, award nominations, and mobile access, making recognition easy and consistent across 50 countries.

As a result, 93% of employees were recognized, engagement rose, and recognition became a top driver of feeling valued—strengthening Chevron’s culture worldwide.

“O.C. Tanner cares about our business. They listen to our strategies and are interested in what drives Chevron. Then they tailor recommendations to what will create value for us. It’s a remarkable partnership.”
‍—Tim Papa, HR General Manager, Compensation and Mobility

Versatile employee recognition with Culture Cloud

O.C. Tanner’s Culture Cloud is the industry leader in employee recognition, offering a smart, human, and inspiring solution that’s ready to help your organization transform its culture.

With robust features, actionable insights, and proven client success stories, Culture Cloud empowers companies to build workplaces where people belong, contribute, and thrive.

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Reach out to start (or improve) your employee recognition experience.