Rise & Shine: Recognition in Action at Workhuman’s 2026 Customer Awards
Table of contents
- Accelerate Award: Honoring Exemplary Design & Launch of a Recognition Program
- Amplify Award: Celebrating Growth & Success of a Recognition Program
- Culture Award: Where Recognition is at the Heart of Work
- Innovator Award: Co-Creating the Future, Together
- Luminary Award: Best-in-Class Recognition Program
- The Workhuman Hall of Fame: The Inaugural Induction
Under the Orlando sun at Workhuman LiveOpens in a new tab, we celebrated the world’s most innovative companies turning employee recognition into tangible culture, connection, and transformation.
What stood out wasn’t just the scale of these programs, but how naturally recognition showed up in the flow of work in everyday moments, across teams, and in ways that made people feel seen. The organizations recognized this year aren’t treating employee appreciation as an initiative. They’re using it to shape how work actually gets done.
Now presenting, the 2026 Workhuman Customer Award recipients:
Accelerate Award: Honoring Exemplary Design & Launch of a Recognition Program
The Accelerate Award honors organizations that launched their recognition program in the last year with heart, strategy, and intention. From day one, these organizations showed that when you prioritize the people who make the work possible, culture momentum follows.
This year, CDK Global, Connecticut Children’s Hospital, Grünenthal, Micron, and Zentiva were each recognized for their employee-first mindset, championing intentional design and clear communications to build enthusiasm and drive immediate engagement with their recognition programs.
In fact, one of our Accelerate Award winners held pre-program launch trainings that were attended by more than 200 people managers. It’s this kind of tenacity and commitment that transforms the workplace and we applaud our Accelerate Award winners on their success!
One Accelerate Award winner achieved a 73% employee log in rate in the first 30 days of their program – and up to 92% employee login rate at the end of their first year.
Amplify Award: Celebrating Growth & Success of a Recognition Program
The Amplify Award celebrates customers whose recognition journeys have evolved and deepened over time. The result is fine-tuned messaging, new channels explored, and ultimately, employees seen, appreciated, and engaged.
Ferguson, Harman, Johnson & Johnson, Kohler, and Sanofi were awarded for continuously pushing the envelope to create fresh initiatives that keep recognition top of mind.
Amplify Award winners know the importance of creating a drumbeat of communication throughout the year, and they excelled at strong, consistent recognition strategies with that in mind. Many of the winners had senior leaders send company wide recognition awards to their employees, along with monthly recognition and appreciation challenges. One Amplify Award winner even hosted internal recognition trainings reaching more than 1,000 employees globally.
This type of commitment leads to real results. Some of our Amplify Award winners have found:
- Two or more awards a year can double retention.
- Quarterly recognition makes employees five times more likely to stay.
Culture Award: Where Recognition is at the Heart of Work
The Culture Award honors organizations for championing recognition into the fabric of their company and how work gets done. They’re celebrating not just the how, but the why – building belonging one meaningful moment at a time.
Akamai, Encore, GE HealthCare, Minto Group, Nutanix, and Viasat are using their recognition platforms to celebrate company initiatives, personal milestones, and moments of belonging that foster deeper connection.
Culture Award winners know the value of recognizing whole humans, and many of them recognized employees for participating in ERGs across wellness, sustainability, and more. There’s an implicit understanding that recognition can be a strategic lever to creatively recognizing efforts which increase customer satisfaction and tie into wellness programs.
Discover how Minto Group made peer-to-peer recognition part of their company’s DNA:
Innovator Award: Co-Creating the Future, Together
Workhuman also recognized customers who are steering the future of employee recognition. Through committed collaboration and championing of human-centric cultures, the Innovator Award winners are co-creating the future of employee recognition.
As this year’s Innovator Award winners, Arkansas Children’s, bp, DuPont, and KLA are the leaders first in line to enable Workhuman enhancements, provide thoughtful product feedback, and eagerly adopt and launch new platform features. Their willingness to collaborate has made them invaluable voices in the evolution of recognition technology.
Innovator Award winners have adopted and shaped some of Workhuman's most important new platform features like:
Luminary Award: Best-in-Class Recognition Program
Spotlighting a program of true excellence, The Luminary Award was presented to Lam Research, a leader and visionary of what’s possible when recognition is championed as a philosophy, not just a program.
From world-class design to spirited advocacy and measurable impact on engagement, retention, and culture, Lam Research has moved beyond tactical to cultural in their recognition journey, and well on their way of reaping the benefits of adopting Human Intelligence.
Lark Kalstad, Director of Global Compensation, highlighted exactly that in the video below.
“We gave Workhuman our voluntary turnover data for a year and Workhuman iQ extrapolated correlations between voluntary turnover and recognition,” she shared. “We found that employees getting at least 4 awards had astronomically lower turnover rates. We also found that, if our new hires received recognition within the first six months, they were 3x less likely to leave.”
See how Lam Research used recognition to transform their culture:
The Workhuman Hall of Fame: The Inaugural Induction
Workhuman is proud to announce Cisco as the first-ever inductee into the Workhuman Hall of Fame, a recognition reserved for organizations whose commitment to recognition spans over a decade and whose impact on their people, their culture, and the field itself has been demonstrably remarkable.
Cisco’s collaboration with Workhuman has shaped the very platform itself. What Cisco has built will be held as a beacon to model by other organizations, time and time again.
“Cisco has been a Workhuman customer for more than a decade and what they’ve built in that time has become a model for a genuine, sustained commitment to their people and culture. Along the way, they’ve helped to shape the Workhuman platform through collaboration and advocacy – setting the standard for best-practice design, creative communications, and the cultural integration of recognition. And they’ve done it consistently, year after year, without ever losing sight of why it matters.”
- Alyssa Johnson, SVP, Customer Excellence, Workhuman
Congratulations to all our 2026 Customer Award recipients for inspiring gratitude and recognition that transforms and humanizes work across the world.
About the author
Lou Evan
Lou Evan is a Senior Content Specialist at Workhuman. Having worked most of his career in the employee recognition space, he brings a firsthand perspective to the cultural, psychological, and ultimately financial impact of tailored, strategic recognition programs. Lou believes in friendship, family, and creativity.