MODERATOR: Well, welcome, everybody. Welcome to today's webinar. We're so glad that you could join us.
We will send out a link to the on demand recording of this webinar later today, so just watch for that in your inboxes.
If you have a question for our two panelists, you can just drop it in that Q&A box. We should have time at the end of today's presentation for them to answer some of those.
I'm gonna introduce our two speakers. Today, we're joined by doctor Alex Lovell, vice president of the O.C. Tanner Institute, and Mimi West, director of global product marketing here at O.C. Tanner. Alex is a political sociologist with more than a decade's worth of deep methodological research, and practitioner experience.
He conducts extensive research on workplace culture, employee experience, and assessment methodologies for the O.C. Tanner Institute. He also curates the perspectives of more than forty thousand leaders and employees, revealing relevant workplace trends for the Institute's annual global culture report, which is informed by his research in field theory, intergenerational dynamics, and culture change.
His dynamic insights transform the cultures of numerous Fortune one hundred and Global two thousand companies as he works to develop targeted culture assessment programs, predictive models, evaluation plans, and listening strategies that help people thrive at work.
Mimi West champions innovations that elevate company culture, strengthen workplace well-being, and empower employees and leaders. With more than sixteen years of business management experience across six continents, she brings a global perspective that helps organizations connect with diverse workforces, adapt to cultural and geographic nuances, and foster a deep sense of belonging.
Her career reflects both strategic expertise and creative passion, and her unique blend of business acumen and artistic training fuels her ability to inspire, communicate, and drive meaningful change in the workplace. Take it away, you two.
DR. ALEX LOVELL: Well, thank you so much, Raven. I am so excited. Welcome, welcome all of you. It's so great to be here with all of you.
Gosh. It's been so long since I've joined you for a webinar, so I'm so excited to be here. I'm so excited to be joined by Mimi. Mimi and I have never done a webinar together yet, so we are thrilled to be here with you all.
Here is what is on the road map for today. Up first, we're going to talk a little bit about our research on what recognition can do for performance, for support, and for retention. I know all of those are pretty hot topics right now, probably top of mind for you on how to build a high performance culture and a healthy performance culture and how to pair support with performance to get, maximize those outcomes, particularly on engagement and retention.
We'll talk about why recognition still misses so many people and what you can do about it.
That ties into our 2026 recognition activation model. We're right at the beginning of the year. New Year's resolutions, I'm sure everybody's top of mind is recognition. Right?
And how to get across your organization, that's why you're here, hopefully. And then practical first steps you can start this quarter if you want.
So let's get started. It's going to be an exciting jam packed time hour together, lunchtime for us.
But, I mean, if you're in the UK, it's nighttime for you.
And India, thank you. I saw somebody from India joining us, so it's the middle of the night for you. So thank you for joining us right in the middle of your night. So it's gonna be a jam packed session.
We are hoping to have about ten minutes for Q&A. If you do have a question, go ahead and put that in the Q&A box, not the chat, and we'll try to get to that at the end.
So let's go ahead. I really want to encourage us to keep something in the back of our heads throughout today, and it's this thread. Recognition scales culture when it travels where work happens.
Activation is kind of this operating idea. Recognition moving through leaders, through customers, through accessible pathways that reaches everyone. I believe, and our research, not just my belief, but our research continues to deliver insights year after year in our global culture report, that recognition is the most scalable way to build cultures with high performance and pair them with high support. That was in our global culture report last year.
And so that brings us to, I think, one of the orienting questions this year, which is, why recognition? Why now?
And so that's why I wanted to kinda just directly talk about this question right up front. I think it's one of the cleanest levers that leaders have to shape culture without adding a ton of bureaucracy to the process, adding a ton of bureaucracy to your one on ones.
We're seeing in the industry right now because we are doing our 2027 global culture report research too right in market. So you're getting kind of a first look.
Don't tell anybody that I'm telling you this, but we're seeing performance pressure rise at the same time. People need support that lands in the day to day. Performance demands are rising. I don't know about you, but I bet you're hearing this over and over again.
Organizations are seeking higher performance. They're raising targets. They're working at a higher pace. They're asking more from people.
And customer demands, our customers are asking more from us too.
And recognition really helps prioritize what matters most and reinforces repeatable wins. I think that's the magic of recognition is that it really helps us signal to people what matters most and what success looks like. Because we know success can be really difficult to frame and show for people. That's always a really interesting theme.
Failure is really easy to kinda point out and say, wow. That was failure. But success is pretty elusive. It's really hard to to point and say, hey. That's what success looks like.
So at this point, teams, they really need support that feels real in the moment, not just posters and policies.
Recognition is that practical human signal that says, hey, I see you.
That, hey, what you did actually mattered. Keep going.
So again, recognition is one of the fastest levers available that doesn't require a new workflow. Most of us already have a recognition program, whether it is something that we built ourselves or it's something that you have purchased through a third party vendor. And when it's done well, it rides on routines that you already have in your workplace too.
Most organizations, most teams already have huddles.They already have team meetings. They already have handoffs from one shift to another shift.
I'm thinking in hospitals, for example, you'll have kind of rounds where they, where you have nurses and doctors that are handing off from one shift to another or manufacturing handoffs. Those are really natural places where you can also hand recognition from one place to another. You have one on ones, and you have customer moments too.
And so when you integrate recognition into this, our research demonstrates that these outcomes show up quite clearly. There's stronger retention intention. We found that there's a two point five times more likely increase to stay at least two or more years. Eleven point one times higher odds of above average engagement, quite large. And eighteen times more, employees are eighteen times more likely to say their workplace has a healthy performance culture. And this is a really important metric.
In our work last year, when we looked at performance, what we found was that employees, when they found this concept of healthy performance, it really paid dividends to organizations because healthy performance was better than just high performance.
Healthy performance was high performance where employees felt supported. So it was sustainable. It was not just burnout culture. It was high performance that employees could continue to do over and over again where they felt engaged, and they felt inspired, and they felt hopeful.
So you'll hear this term over and over again too. We'll use the term integrated recognition to describe recognition that's consistent, meaningful, and part of how work runs. And so I wanted to quickly run through that and our research on it because it's really critical for how we begin to embed recognition into organizations.
So this model is a really helpful snapshot, and it makes it really easy to understand recognition integration and how to integrate it into organizations.
It's all about leaders more frequently recognizing employees, employees feeling like recognition is an everyday part of the culture. That recognition is continually improved. I think one of the best measures is that if your recognition program is built and in implemented in one year and then hasn't been improved for two to three after that, it's out of date.
Your culture is constantly changing as employees join and leave, as you acquire new customers, as you improve your products and innovate. And so is your culture. It's a living, breathing organism. And so your recognition program, when it's aligned with culture, should change too. The organization should recognize both large and small efforts, and it should be seen across the organization.
Peer to peer recognition should be there, but more importantly, leaders should also be recognizing, and they should know how employees want to be recognized. And that recognition should be crafted to the individual. So when all of these elements are there and employees really feel them and report them, that's when you know that recognition has truly been integrated into your culture.
So when integrated recognition is present, you really do see three things. You see high connection. You see healthy, high performing teams and cultures, and you see change readiness and nimble resilience.
And I know, like, you really need those things right now. It feels like every year we're on a new clip of change, and that change is just always gonna be there. I feel like and as we talk with employees, we just got out of focus groups, and they're just like, yep. We're doing more change. And it's just change is the name of the game right now because our, every industry is under pressure to continue to change and respond to new and developing external pressures. We have AI that continues to force how we do things, why we do things, how we integrate, and remain kind of nimble.
And that is what integrated recognition truly helps us remain ready to do.
And, you know, I just really actually stole my thunder, so we'll just really quickly move through these. I do this to myself sometimes. I forget that I create really fantastic slides to help me unpack these in a little bit more detail, but let's talk real quick about how recognition drives connection through our research.
People feel seen for real work, and that is how recognition begins to connect to purpose, that sense of individual purpose, but then connecting to that broader organizational purpose. How does that work that they're doing on an individual level connect to the work that the organization does from an organizational perspective?
Accomplishment. We struggle as organizations sometimes to create enough opportunity for people. Recognition helps people see the opportunity that they actually had.
That can be very powerful. A lot of people forget what they've done.
That might seem like a simple statement, but when you start to help people see all the bullet points they added to their resume just in one project, oh, it really helps people absorb everything and all the opportunities that they've already had and all the accomplishments that they had.
And it really helps drive connection through a sense of belonging, not just from a one to one perspective, but from a team perspective, from a departmental perspective, and that I belong here.
From a healthy high performance perspective, recognition plays that role from an emotional perspective. It helps them feel supported. It, again, clarifies what good looks like. We struggle as organizations and as leaders to be clear about what our expectations are.
I as a leader, once in a while, I really struggle with that.
We all do.
But recognition does provide a picture about what good looks like that not only that individual can continue to carry forward, but when we do it publicly, it helps others on the team and within the department understand what success is in this organization when we have different corporate values and opportunities that we really want to shine a light on. Recognition helps provide visibility to what we're trying to change, and it reinforces habits that makes results repeatable.
And then again, from that resilience perspective, what we found in our research, especially last year, is that trust rises, and trust rises through transparency.
Retention strengthens. Resilience grows. And, again, teams absorb change without that resistance.
I know it says with resistance, but I know it says without resistance. That was just a typo on my part.
So one challenge, though, that we continue to find. We found this first truly a couple years ago, and we continue to find this in the data, is there is an equity gap.
In many organizations, recognition does not reach everybody in meaningful ways.
Tools and platforms, they help, But many high-tech approaches just don't reach a hundred percent of your people in the ways that matter most to them.
And I can guarantee to you that this gap is not intentional.
I know that when we build recognition strategies, we really try to build them with the best of intentions.
Cassandra in the chat talks about how these equity gaps can stem from unconscious biases. Yes.
We just sometimes are just unaware of realities in our organizations. And again, we build with the best of intentions in mind. And it's usually access, timing, and channel fit.
What our research showed is that offline workers, about eighty percent of the global workforce based on different reports that we reviewed and a lot of our data too, they experience real gaps, not just with recognition either. It's a lot of our workforce tools.
Leaders have less visibility into their work moments, and not just leaders, HR does too.
Access to recognition tools and other types of workplace tools is uneven or nonexistent.
And the result is and I'm usually not allowed to name things, but since Mimi and I were putting this webinar together, I named it. So hopefully, I don't get in trouble. I called it a recognition desert.
Because when we don't have access to recognition tools and people have less visibility or no visibility into their work moments, it makes it really difficult to give them recognition to surface their amazing moments and to connect them with those moments that are very well deserving to be called out and showcased too.
And in our research, what we found is that these tools that we often put into place, these technology solutions require reliable access. And one of the first places that we go is a personal phone.
And when we talk to employees about this, well, we find out that they're not great substitutes.
They're really hard to use at work, and they're often prohibited in production environments.
But there's more than that.
Technological fluency is also a real barrier.
We assume that employees are really, that they're really able to leverage their mobile device in ways that we, that often use mobile devices and technology, can quickly use.
But that's not true. In fact, many employees still struggle with basic, like, payroll tasks and other types of tasks on mobile devices.
I will never forget a moment in a focus group where one employee looked at me and he said, I still have my child help me submit my payroll, my time card.
He's like, I just don't understand the system that my child does because he uses the phone all the time.
So technological fluency is also a component that we just sometimes forget about.
And so our research, when we ask employees about what they really want in terms of that recognition experience, well, it runs a big spectrum.
But there's a couple things that really surface that or really surface. One is leader recognition. It really matters.
And we'll talk a little bit about why, and Mimi will connect with how we can make that happen in a more meaningful way.
Customer recognition.
And, of course, that should be "woah. Of course!"
A lot of these employees are interacting with our customers. So why wouldn't they want recognition directly from the source?
They want recognition to be in the moment or as close to in the moment as possible.
And they kinda want it low tech, and they want it most of all clear, human and fast.
So how do we close the gap?
Today, we're going to share based on off of our research, a simple model that you can use to begin to build reach, to pick channels, and to turn recognition into repeatable routines.
And we've called it the 2026 recognition activation model.
And it's built on three engines, and it's built up against that standard of integrated recognition.
And we can go to the next slide. Our first engine is customer to employee recognition.
And that in customer to employee recognition is a fantastic way to build meaning and credibility.
The second engine is leader powered recognition, and this is a fantastic way of building reach and habit.
And that third engine is through mobile and offline pathways, and this is a fantastic way of restoring equity.
And together, we build this against that standard of integrated recognition, and that's how we make all of these engines work.
Again, it does that by keeping recognition frequent and timely.
It keeps it personal and authentic. It helps it remain equitable across every employee type, and it keeps it embedded in the way work happens because that's important.
All of those employees across every kind of part of your organization, well, they all do work differently.
So that means recognition needs to happen in a variety of different ways.
And that means technology needs to scale in a variety of different ways too. And it needs to maybe look and operate in different ways.
So let's start with the engine one, customer to employee recognition.
And this engine is all about meaning and credibility and bringing real customer voice into the employee moment.
So what is it? And, you know, this is one of those beautiful things where it's fairly self explanatory.
Customer recognition is all about capturing and circulating customer gratitude as a feedback loop. And it matters because customer gratitude lands as belonging for frontline teams.
And in our research with employees, when we talk about customer gratitude, is that these stories actually surface kind of under-talked about skills, like patience and de-escalation and care.
And they're just credible in ways where internal praise just sometimes isn't.
MIMI WEST: And a lot of these moments are already happening.
And as Alex shared, when a customer or a passenger or a patient, depending on what the business is, or other visitor to the organization comes and tells you that you've made a difference, that is priceless.
That is one of those moments that so many of us long for, knowing that our organization is making a difference. Yet the research shows that only one in four organizations actually practice that outside-in recognition, capturing that recognition that comes from customers. So chances are this means your organization is one that may lack a simple way to make this powerful data capture possible.
That is one reason why at O.C. Tanner, we're always looking at the research and looking at new ways to innovate and make this easier for our clients.
So we've introduced a product that we've had in the works since 2015, and it has now evolved into what we call Say Thanks. It's a wonderful, modern, flexible feature in O.C. Tanner's Culture Cloud platform or technology platform. It makes that customer to employee recognition possible for everyone. It's a simple way for clients to participate and recognize team members all in one place.
And as this data comes through, managers can see it. They can approve or even decline when it comes through.
If you would like to learn a little bit more, you can go to saythanks.com, and our clients have their own domain, saythanks.com with their company name embedded in there. This URL can be placed at the bottom of emails, invoices, and other places wherever you would like it to be.
So with Say Thanks, leaders and companies can create a QR code that can be highlighted on any variety of signage, which we can help co-create. Cards, posters, table tents, those offline touch points like Alex was describing to bring more people in to this opportunity where that customer interaction happens, whether it's in lobbies, lounges, waiting areas, you name it.
This can be further customized so that each employee has a personal QR code that they may have at their workstation or on their lanyard or their placard, making it easy for a client or a customer to recognize them and for it to be received.
So the customer scans the QR code. This takes them to a simple interface where they can share or note their appreciation and their thanks and write a little note. Managers are then alerted, making them aware of the great work that's happening there, and they can approve or even decline the comment, as I mentioned before. This builds in safeguards, and there are many more safeguards that help with privacy, with governance, budget, and reporting, all of which are very important to leaders.
There are even AI assists to help customers craft their message.
So one thing our data has shown us, we all know that HR leaders really value employee engagement. Our clients have seen the multiplying effect when they layer in celebration of career milestones, service anniversaries with meaningful recognition, and it continues.
When you acknowledge an employee's performance has gone above and beyond with that extra effort, and then pair that with a tool like Say Thanks to bring that customer outside-in recognition. This can boost engagement by a factor of ten x. So adding Say Thanks is one of the best ways that you can uplift and inspire your people.
So when it comes to customer recognition, here are four best practices to implement. First, keeping the feedback raw and real is always a good practice. There's no need to polish it or make it sound different. The closer to the customer voice, the more authentic and the more meaningful, especially as you go down these additional steps.
You can bring it into team spaces, huddles, handoffs, visibilities where people congregate and gather to receive this.
It's also, best practice the faster this can happen. Within forty eight hours is optimal so that the feedback is still relevant and fresh and learning can happen. And then it can be shared across functions so that others can learn from this voice of customer.
Each piece of recognition becomes then a gem of learning. And as you put these best practices into place, you will build a treasure trove of helpful feedback and testimonials. One of the things that we all desire so much is that feedback and those testimonials of how are we doing, and how can we continuously improve. And you can do this all while helping your customer facing employees feel seen, included, and inspired.
ALEX: Thanks, Mimi. I just love that additive effect that customer recognition has or customer to employee recognition. I think Say Thanks is so much easier to say than customer to employee recognition, such a wordy way of saying that. So this is why I'm not allowed to name things as you can see. Say Thanks, such an easier way to say that. But that that additive approach, right, is just so powerful. Customer recognition is just incredible.
But let's take you to the next engine, which is leader powered recognition, and this is the reach engine. Leaders are the fastest path to where work happens. Yes, customers are great, but leaders often see, and they see so many things.
And also peers can surface moments that matter to leaders in a way that, customers often can't. Leader powered recognition, again, is one of the fastest path to reach where work happens. And this is because leaders already intersect with daily work, and they can match recognition to individual preferences.
And this is a leadership skill. Right? A lot of leaders are not immediately the best recognizers, so we have to help leaders along their journey to become better leaders. But they, once they understand that they can get to know people and they can get to know how people like to be recognized, oh, it is so powerful for employees to receive recognition that matches their preferences.
And for offline employees, it can just be a simple matter just to know that, hey, I like to be recognized in front of a group, or I like to be recognized in front of a small group. Right? Like, that visibility factor is important.
You know, I like when you call out these things for me versus these other things. Right? I had one employee who once told me, hey, I really value when people call my leadership abilities out, and that was such an important tidbit to understand about this person.
So when I recognize them, I make a special effort to understand that, you know, they like it when I connect to their leadership abilities a little bit more, and I do. Those preferences matter. One thing that is really critical, if you can go back to that slide one more time, is that offline employee or teams prefer leader delivered recognition.
Peer to peer matters. Don't don't get me wrong here.
But when we talk to employees, they already have a fairly organic way of of doing kind of peer to peer. Right? This is something that kind of emerges organically.
What offline teams are looking for from organizations to deliver is better structured leader delivered recognition because it is something that is lacking. It is something that leaders are already burdened from an operational perspective, and so something that is more systematic and is much more organized and resourced appropriately is something that employees are looking for when we talk to employees about what's missing in their employee experience and what will help them feel more seen and valued and ultimately lead to better outcomes.
So let's talk a little bit about some of these best practices.
First is just to make leader recognition some of that default lane for offline teams. Peers are in a great position to help leaders notice. Right? But leaders are going to be better to deliver the moment. This is partially because leaders in these organizations are better equipped to make decisions about promotions and about shift changes and all sorts of things that we often don't think about. And that's why leader recognition just matters in to a different degree.
Start with a tiny cadence that leaders can repeat. Sometimes we go really big when it comes to leader recognition.
And these leaders, again, they're already pretty overburdened.
And so we need to start small with a tiny cadence that is repeatable and in places that they already have designed for meeting with teams and help train what good looks like. What specific behavior are we recognizing? What was its impact? If we have values that we really want to align to, let's link to there and help them work on short natural language, not very formalized language that is going to feel very inauthentic.
Offline teams really matter about that. They really matters about that organic authenticity.
The next part is to create a central store so that leaders can self serve.
When we do have kind of those things that they need to be able to provide, whether there's a monetary component or some type of swag or other types of things, we need to be able to provision those to leaders.
And so giving them those central points of contact is really critical. And kind of keep choice tight at launch and then expand after habits form. There is such a thing as too much choice right at the beginning.
That can be a lot. So helping people build those habits, helping them get to know the preferences of individual, and then expansion is critical.
Build in the moment options for speed. Quick handoff formats are critical. Helping them with handwritten note pairings. We have heard so much about handwritten notes from people. Those do matter. There is a personalization component, particularly for offline people that offline employees and online employees have like, there is no like, there's a handwritten component that can be really, really meaningful.
So those speed components really do matter and ensure that replenishment is easy.
Make sure there's a predictable restock rhythm. Make sure that administration is easy with minimal steps, and make sure that ordering is simple.
MIMI: So it was really all of this marketplace back listening with which we designed Manager Store. So Manager Store is one powerful way to bring all of this together with a lovingly crafted marketplace experience that is unique to your organization.
So this custom marketplace allows managers to order these recognition tools, including those ones Alex was describing, for their teams through a simple ecommerce experience that feels familiar to them.
This supports every employee, including those eighty percent of employees who don't have desks, gifting them with tangible recognition that they can often receive in a hand delivered manner from their manager, from their leader, which then reinforces the meaningfulness of that gift.
So leaders can order awards, batches of branded company swag, pins, certificates, and other collectibles, providing new ways to celebrate their essential workers and help them feel celebrated.
This helps all employees feel included, and this is really a powerful tool for helping those deskless employees feel seen and valued and to create meaningful moments together. More people, more often, more ways is something you'll hear us say a lot at O.C. Tanner. It's really become a rally cry for us.
Manager Store helps you make sure leaders never run out of ways to keep the recognition flowing among their teams.
But we have a lot of evidence as to why Manager Store works so effectively, especially when it's tailored to what employees want, including offline employees, making it unique to them, things that are meaningful to them and not generic.
They can really help reinforce the values of a company and build that company culture.
Curating selectively, like Alex was describing, really beats a huge overwhelming volume of catalogs that also create other challenges such as returning items that don't land. That is not always a good experience for users. So, really, that intentional design and making it feel familiar and simple really helps with a lot of those challenges.
Variety sustains momentum, and simplicity drives adoption. So it's really the balance among these factors. And it turns recognition into a repeatable leader habit, which brings us to our our third engine, which Alex will tell you about.
ALEX: The mute button finally got me. We're so many years after COVID, and I finally I have not been able to get the mute button fully trained out of me. So engine three is our mobile and our offline pathways, and I really believe that this is the equity engine. This is about closing gaps that are created by access, by device rules, by workplace constraints, and it's about, you know, taking our research about the all the different ways that people work and how they prefer to access recognition, how they prefer to be recognized, and blending it with technology so that you really just help restore equity to our global and diverse workforces again.
So, again, what this is, it's recognition access that works on production floors and fields and in restricted environments from oil refineries and oil rigs in the ocean to even, you know, our janitorial services. And just everywhere that somebody can work, they can still be recognized. They can still access recognition to give so that there are no recognition deserts, so that there's clear pathways for every recognition type.
And when designing these pathways, I think we just think about limited technology. There's not always going to be technology access. And so sometimes technology will play a logistics role.
Right? Not always an immediate user facilitated role. But that is still technology, and technology can still be useful. So it's not always burdensome.
Delivery always is human. It's fast, and it's visible. And technology can still support tracking, replenishment, and routing. And so technology, I want to broaden our thinking about how technology helps us deliver all of these different things.
So there are user components about how we can facilitate user technology that's directly to our users. And then there's the background role that user plays or that technology plays for our users that they might not facilitate. And the mobile and offline pathways technology plays a role in both.
MIMI: And this is where it gets really exciting when we talk about mobile and offline pathways. How do we reduce those recognition deserts? Alex, I'm officially approving that name you came up with. It's a very, very good one.
ALEX: Just between the two of us at least.
MIMI: We're on a webinar, so I guess it's official now.
But how are, there are many different ways that you can reach more employees with an inclusive market leading platform.
So our Culture Cloud platform includes a mobile app that is very highly rated. It's easy to use and now easier than ever for employees everywhere to access and to download. So it puts recognition in every employee's pocket so they can give and receive recognition anytime, anywhere.
So as we mentioned, mobile is just one of many tools in your toolkit. But as far as the mobile app goes, we've really made it fun for peers to recognize peers. And a lot of that organic peer to peer recognition that we mentioned is already happening can then be captured in the platform on the go in a simple, easy way.
Managers can recognize their team members. Leaders can recognize anyone, anywhere, and all employees who access this can customize their message to reflect each coworker's personality by choosing from a selection of delightful GIFs, photos, and videos.
In addition, one of those accessibility tools that we provide is easy offline redemption QR codes. So there's a variety of QR codes we have. This one specifically is very easy to access anytime, anywhere, reaching more people.
So employees can scan the code in this instance to automatically claim their points in the platform and redeem them for awards.
It's very quick. It reduces a lot of friction. It's familiar and intuitive. There's no need to type long, complicated codes.
Employees can simply scan and then get to enjoying their award.
And one feature we're very excited to announce to you all, you might have seen some buzz on social media about it, is recognition moments. In the Culture Cloud app, this new feature allows employees to see a fun review of their year in recognition, relieving the magic from the entire year. If you're curious, you can even use this QR code to download.
So what recognition moments brings is every person can see messages they've received and the impact they've had on the company throughout the year, all in a very personalized, dynamic experience. And as you all know, it's really important to have features that actually boost employee engagement at work. And one of these success metrics is the talkworthiness. Are people actually talking about this feature?
Are they engaging with each other? Are they creating moments that are meaningful? One thing I love so much about this feature is it takes the recognition that has already happened and serves it up without any incremental lift to the client, to the user, to just relive that magic, recreate those moments. Our clients, their employees, and O.C. Tanner employees have been posting up a storm on social media and having a lot of fun with this.
I didn't need to ask my own permission to share with you my social post, which I was really excited about going in there and seeing what my personalized view looked like. And, Raven and Alex, I can't wait to see yours as well.
ALEX: Wow. Thanks for calling me out. Can't wait to share.
MIMI: Maybe go post after this webinar.
ALEX: Maybe.
MIMI: So we're always coming up with more ways to reach more people and more often. So choosing a recognition solution that integrates with all the major HR systems that employees use every day, they're already using some technologies that may or may not have a direct tie in with recognition.
Well, we can integrate with any and all of those most important solutions to meet those employees in the flow of work where they are.
So this can include wellness programs, HR information systems, and many, many other technologies.
And now as we mentioned before, the technology piece and the mobile pieces are exceptionally important.
In addition, what more can leaders do? Providing tangible treasures customized to the company values and delivered in ways tailored to individual employee preferences can go a long way.
So at O.C. Tanner, we help hundreds of companies design the right programs for their needs. Impact studies have even demonstrated that the highest ROI occurs by combining digital and print in products such as Yearbooks and merchandise with personal trophies and other symbols of accomplishment that are meaningful to individuals as well as teams.
So in summary, here's a few best practices that you can can take away with you today.
So first, design for the realities of your worksite, where employees are, where they're gonna congregate, where they can most easily access technology. That's where mobile can really help. So making mobile app access easy with things like QR codes in the places where they congregate physically can go a long way.
The extent to which you can also reduce friction from logins or if you can eliminate logins entirely, that can also aid the cause with supporting those in the moment spontaneous moments to be able to capture and access those things.
So then when it comes to offline formats, including a variety of tools, there isn't one single tool that's going to capture one hundred percent of all employees. So the variety is key to reduce the dependency on things like personal devices. Not everyone has a laptop. Not everyone has a desk, and not everyone will have or even desire that access to their mobile device for this purpose. So physical cards, site kits, preloaded options, and even printed prompts can all help with this.
So how on earth do we get started?
ALEX: Well and, I was looking at the time, and we are doing so well. We're almost at our Q&A too, and I love that we are starting to get some questions. So quick reminder, if you have a, if you have a question, go ahead. Let's get our Q&A populated with some questions as we're wrapping it up.
So let's close with a simple four step plan where you can start to get, to activate recognition for your, you know, a hundred percent of your population in 2026. So, really, the theme is to start with one gap and to prove impact.
Let's start with step one, which is find out who's being missed. And this is a great place to use your data. You can check recognition volume, by role, by shift, by site, by tenure. And here, I would just flag one to two recognition deserts where access or enablement begins to break down.
And access and enablement, by the way, are from our chapter on the eighty percent, and that's where access is just really, really tough. Or enablement is where people might have access, but it's really hard to help them use the system. Right? So where, technically, for example, everybody might have an email address that is for O.C. Tanner's sake, that is O.C. Tanner, but maybe they're in a manufacturing part of the organization and they can't get off their shift to send an ecard.
Well, that would be an enablement problem. They're really not enabled to use the software. So, you know, access and enablement is is breaking down to some extent. So that would be step one.
MIMI: Excellent. And step two, among these groups you've identified, match these with where they intersect with a leader who can then help and be a champion. So pick your top two to start, and then you can take this further. So some common examples that we've seen among our clients are employees working the night shifts, field technicians, those working in the back of the house.
We advise you don't necessarily pick the hardest group to go after first. You can pick the clearest where you can learn fast. I always like to put together a framework of kind of easiest to begin with and then working up towards those more aspirational, really hard to solve for gaps.
ALEX: I mean, if you wanna go big, go big. But, it's, you know, stepwise improvement. It's always always encouraged to, you know, if you want to for each group, you know, name one reliable leader intersection point, you already have these intersection points in your organization. Places like shift huddles or safety briefings, when routes are starting for kind of logistics-minded parts of your organization or even shift handoffs from one shift to another, are maybe nice places to start.
MIMI: And then finally, you can choose the primary engine that fits that setting that corresponds to that group. So we mentioned Manager Store, sometimes called Leader Store, for leader-delivered on the spot recognition.
Customer recognition for frontline meaning and credibility.
And those offline pathways may be best suited for low tech delivery for those employees for whom that best suits their needs, or maybe they work in restricted sites where the technology is not even an option for them.
So you can write one simple trigger. When we see x, we will do y. You can keep it short and memorable.
ALEX: And those those are really easy because you're gonna have to get a lot of buy in from people to to kind of move with you. And so those those those statements just kinda help you create a mantra that everybody buys into.
MIMI: Yes.
ALEX: And then the next is to really kind of turn on the engines that close your biggest gap. So Leader Store kinda helps activate that leader ordering, so recognition happens in the flow of of work. It's helping connect them to some of those different resources. Customer recognition is activating that customer voice.
So praise really becomes a moment fast. And then mobile and offline, that helps activate those different delivery pathways. So if mobile is a great option for some of those groups, mobile becomes one of those places where peer to peer and leader happens. And if mobile's not, those different offline components can work without phones or lock ins.
MIMI: And then finally, the fourth step is to measure impact.
We love to measure things. You love to measure things. And this is a good way to make the win visible when it occurs and to reveal ways that you can adapt your approach.
So rerun your conversation for these recognition desert groups.
So there are three proof signals that you can track.
First is coverage. Who is now being seen?
The speed with which they are being seen, how quickly is recognition happening after the moment.
And quality. Messages are specific and meaningful, and then share the story internally.
Focusing on quick, simple charts and adding at least one employee example really aid with the storytelling and helping to bring that to life for your stakeholders.
ALEX: Perfect. So wow. Thank you. We've just covered so much. And thank you, everybody, in the chat that said that this has been a useful conversation.
I know that Mimi and I sure sure hope it's been. We were probably biased. Of course, we thought it was, but, we put the presentation together. So, of course, we're gonna think that it was useful.
So thank you all for for your conversation today, and everything that you've added. Our key takeaways from today is that recognition scales culture when and it travels where work happens. That's just critical.
Activation help closes this equity gap that we've exposed in our research over and over again.
That equity gap is is there. There are parts of our organization that simply just doesn't receive recognition like other parts, and so we need to close that gap. It's critical that we do.
And there's three engines that help us do it, And we can, those engines, customer recognition, leader powered recognition, and those different mobile and offline pathways are really, really great, different, diverse pathways to help us do that, and they all work against one standard of integrated recognition.
We've talked about a four step process that you can start now to start with one desert and then prove that impact and then expand from there. We hope that is a actual framework for you to start now to make 2026 a more activated year for recognition, to really help recognition be the best that it can be throughout your organization and drive those outcomes that matter.
We believe this year can be a year of healthy high performance of even lower return like, lower lower lower gosh. What what is the word that I'm looking for? Higher engagement and, less attrition. Right? The year where your organization is performing the best that it can.
MIMI: Yes. Know that you you have a friend in the industry here at O.C. Tanner, we're always researching with Institute and Alex's team. We're always innovating to find new ways that we can listen to the marketplace and help you solve your most vexing challenges.
ALEX: Very well said. Thank you. Well, with that, we have a couple questions that we can, we do have a couple couple ones. So I have the Q&A open. I'm just gonna probably just read a couple off. We did not have ten minutes. Like, that was very aspirational.
So we'll ask a couple. And then if you have more questions, please reach out to us through, like, octanner.com. There are, we do have our sales partners that are willing and best equipped to answer some of these different questions.
One of the first questions on here, we currently celebrate our associates service anniversaries with desserts, which is delightful, and I first read that as desert given our conversation today. So I'm glad that it was desserts.
But we're looking to switch things up, and we'd love to find a nonfood option that's meaningful and budget friendly. Do you have suggestions?
I think Mimi, any thoughts there? I can definitely take that question.
MIMI: Yes. I think it can be very personal to the team or teams within the organization.
We do a variety of things at O.C. Tanner. Food is certainly a great way to show appreciation, can have its limitations.
Sometimes it's just spontaneous recognition on the spot. There's a variety of tools like the ones we've described here. You can get really creative in this age of AI as well. You can come up with poems or songs that are personalized to a joke that maybe you have with some teammates or write them, write them a little song and surprise them with it. I think, generally, people like certain types of surprises, and that can be a very personal thing too.
Alex, I'm sure you have other ideas.
ALEX: Yeah. I think I mean, one of the best ways to do it is, I mean, we love, I mean, we have a product very well suited for this, which is our Yearbook product, which has different comments that are collected from our leaders and peers. I don't know if you're using that right now, but that is one thing that I'd look at, not just from a product perspective, but just from the meaningfulness that tends to collect all of those different sentiments from leaders and employees and bringing it all together in a meaningful package.
And the reason why I bring that up is it gives something tangible, and we know that from a tangibility perspective, employees that receive something tangible in connection with that recognition moment, they're three point five times more likely to remember the experience.
And because of that, that saves in their memory bank, and they start to relate that really positive memory to your organization and their culture, and they're more likely to stay because of that.
And so I think the more that we can bring tangibility into the equation and then even bring some of those symbolic components of your culture, employees are looking to be part of the story. They want their individual story to be part of the organizational story. And so the more that we can do that, the better.
If you're already doing that and you're including kind of, like, a dessert or something as part of that, I think that's a nice add on. I would see, and I would maybe even go back to them and hold a couple focus groups to understand, like, what is the experience like right now and what are they looking for from that experiential component.
Sometimes it's a little bit more of a team, and more localized experiential component that they're looking for, not a broader experience. So that's kind of, I would say my next place to go would be to do more of a focus group to see the experiential aspect and and understand it from that perspective.
MIMI: I love that idea, Alex. I think focus groups have been a really powerful way even in our internal culture to kind of take a pulse on things, learn, and also to identify what has shifted over time because things change. People's preferences can also change, and team dynamics change. Surveys can also be a powerful tool just to kinda help keep a pulse on things in general.
ALEX: Well, we are out of time. So darn. I think, we will go ahead and start to close-up.
Raven, is there a specific way that we...
MODERATOR: Nope.
Well, just, thank everybody for coming, and, make sure to join us next month. We'd love to see you at our February webinar on transparency and inclusion. So have a good day, everybody.
MIMI: Thank you so much. Take care.
