Running an employee of the month program sounds simple...until you're buried in nomination forms, email chains, and a spreadsheet that somehow has three different versions. Sound familiar?

Awardco's newest feature, Awardco Nominations™, is built to change that. In a recent Product Pulse webinar, Product Manager Amanda Nuttall walked through exactly how it works—and why it's already saving HR teams significant time.

What Awardco Nominations actually does

Nominations is a dedicated program type inside Awardco that manages the entire nomination lifecycle in one place: collecting submissions, routing them for review, and recognizing winners (and nominees), all without leaving the platform.

It lives right alongside your existing recognition programs in the Awardco 2.0 navigation, so the setup experience will feel familiar if you've built programs before.

Fully configurable from the start

When setting up a nominations program, admins control the details that matter most to their organization:

• Whether employees can nominate individuals, groups, or both
• Self-nomination rules and nomination limits per person
• Eligibility criteria based on department, cost center, or other employee data
• Custom questions—written responses, file uploads, value tags, and more
• Winner and nominee award settings, including point amounts

That last point is worth calling out: you can award points to winners, and optionally send a recognition to nominees at the time of submission or at the end. Making someone feel seen for being nominated, before the results are even in, is one of the ways this program can meaningfully impact culture.

A smarter review process

One of the biggest pain points in running nomination programs is managing the review process. Awardco addresses this with configurable review rounds, each with its own style:

Approval rounds are a simple pass/fail gate — useful for checking things like performance standing. These can automatically route to a nominee's direct supervisor, so admins don't have to manually assign every submission.

Voting rounds let assigned reviewers cast votes across a pool of nominees. Admins choose who votes and how many votes each reviewer gets.

Coming soon: committee voting, which will allow a group of people to collectively review and score a set of submissions—along with a text rubric admins can configure to guide reviewer decisions.

Reviewers don't need admin access to participate. Once assigned, they receive an automatic notification and can complete their review directly in Awardco.

Visibility throughout, not just at the end

Most nomination programs only recognize one winner. Awardco Nominations is designed to create recognition moments throughout the process, not just at the finish line.

Admins can choose to notify nominees when they're submitted, giving people the chance to know their work was called out before results are announced. At the close of the program, admins can then recognize winners and remaining nominees from the finalization screen.

This approach helps the program drive broader engagement, not just a single moment of celebration.

What's on the roadmap

The team is actively building toward three goals: reducing bias in the review process (including anonymized voting), further automating administrative work, and better supporting large-scale programs with hundreds of nominees. Committee voting is the next major release on deck.

Want to see the full walkthrough, including a live demo of the admin experience? Watch the complete webinar recording below.

Watch the full recording