L'état de la reconnaissance 2027

Reprenons là où nous en étions

Historiquement, l'impact de la reconnaissance a été difficile à quantifier et à visualiser. De nombreux fournisseurs de solutions de reconnaissance, de récompenses et d'engagement vantent les mérites de la reconnaissance, mais les données probantes pour appuyer ces affirmations étaient rares.

Le Centre d'excellence d'Awardco a donc décidé de s'y attaquer.

Notre premier rapport sur l'état de la reconnaissance, publié à la fin de 2025, a été extrêmement instructif. Les données étaient claires : la reconnaissance a un impact majeur sur l'engagement, le bien-être, l'intention de rester en poste et une foule d'autres résultats qui préoccupent les dirigeants. Voici quelques faits saillants :

• Les employés reconnus sont 2,3 fois plus susceptibles d'être engagés
• Les employés reconnus sont également 1,7 fois plus susceptibles de vouloir rester, 2,1 fois plus susceptibles de se sentir inclus et 2,4 fois plus susceptibles de déclarer un niveau de bien-être élevé¹
• La méthode de reconnaissance compte et a un impact mesurable sur les résultats
• La fréquence de la reconnaissance est le facteur le plus important
• Les récompenses significatives surpassent systématiquement les récompenses génériques
• De nombreuses entreprises présentent encore un réel fossé en matière de reconnaissance qu'elles tentent de combler

Cette année, le Centre d'excellence d'Awardco est retourné sur le terrain avec une étude plus vaste et plus mondiale pour vérifier si ces chiffres se maintenaient. Après avoir sondé 4 792 employés dans 21 pays, 11 secteurs d'activité et au sein d'organisations de 250 employés ou plus, nos conclusions pourraient vous surprendre.²

Les conclusions de l'étude de cette année couvrent plusieurs domaines :

[[4 ENCADRÉS]]

Ceci étant dit, plongeons dans ce que nous avons appris.

Pourquoi la diversité des canaux l'emporte sur le choix d'un canal unique

La recherche de l'an dernier a révélé que la méthode et la fréquence de la reconnaissance avaient toutes deux un impact significatif sur l'engagement. Dans les données de cette année, nous sommes allés plus loin en nous concentrant sur l'expérience employé dans son ensemble.

Dans cette optique, nous avons procédé à une mesure complète de l'expérience employé, en explorant des sujets tels que les perspectives de carrière, la vision et la stratégie de l'entreprise, ainsi que les possibilités d'apprentissage, ce qui nous a permis de découvrir des perspectives plus approfondies sur l'impact de la reconnaissance.

Nos recherches ont révélé des signaux intéressants. Le premier concerne l'impact d'une plateforme de reconnaissance sur la reconnaissance plus large au sein d'une organisation. Les entreprises qui n'utilisent pas de plateforme de reconnaissance s'appuient fortement sur les rencontres individuelles privées pour reconnaître leurs employés :

• Aucune plateforme dédiée : 62 % des employés de ces entreprises ont reçu une reconnaissance lors d'une rencontre individuelle privée au cours des 3 derniers mois, un chiffre qui tombe à 37 % pour la méthode la plus populaire suivante, les mentions publiques (shout outs).
• Plateforme dédiée : Dans les entreprises dotées de plateformes de reconnaissance dédiées, 58 % des employés ont reçu une reconnaissance lors de rencontres individuelles privées au cours des 3 derniers mois, mais cela est complété beaucoup plus largement par la reconnaissance via des mentions publiques, le courriel et leurs plateformes de reconnaissance (respectivement 52 %, 48 % et 46 %).

En bref, les entreprises qui utilisent une plateforme de reconnaissance privilégient toujours la reconnaissance en personne, mais la complètent beaucoup plus par une reconnaissance écrite. Il est possible que la mise en place d'une plateforme rehausse et formalise la pratique de la reconnaissance, de sorte qu'elle ne fasse pas seulement partie d'une conversation entre gestionnaire et employé, mais qu'elle soit considérée comme une pratique à part entière.

De plus, nos recherches montrent également que les plateformes de reconnaissance éliminent presque complètement le problème des employés qui ne reçoivent aucune reconnaissance. En faisant de la reconnaissance une pratique formelle et en facilitant sa transmission, le travail est souligné plus fréquemment.

Voici ce que nous avons découvert:

Lorsque les entreprises n'ont pas de plateforme de reconnaissance, 15 % de leurs employés déclarent n'avoir reçu aucune reconnaissance au cours des trois derniers mois. Ce chiffre tombe à 3 % pour les entreprises qui utilisent une plateforme de reconnaissance, soit une amélioration de 80 % !

The research clearly shows that investment in a platform does increase recognition behavior in an organization, and that increase has an effect on overall engagement.

[[PIE CHART]]

The study further found that the engagement score for employees who do not feel recognized at work is 30% – a clear indicator of the importance of recognition in creating a healthy workforce.

Multi-channel recognition’s impact on engagement scores

The research shows that engagement scores for employees tie directly into how often they’re recognized and through which channels.

When employees aren’t recognized, their engagement score is 30%. Not great. However, when they’d reported being recognized through one channel in last three months, their engagement score nearly doubled to 58%!

Even more interesting, engagement scores for those who’d received recognition through two channels in the past three months jumped to 70%, while those who reported being recognized through three channels scored at 77%.

[[BAR CHART]]

Realizing the highest gains across employee experience

With the expanded scope of this year’s research, we wanted to understand what would have the broadest impact on the employee experience as a whole. In expanding our scope, we confirmed that manager recognition and service anniversaries remain the cornerstone of recognition activities that have the broadest impact on employees.

As practitioners, both manager recognition and service anniversaries have been a recommendation for years to those organizations just starting out with recognition, and now we have the data to prove that these remain foundational to any recognition program. Organizations that aren’t embedding these two practices into their HR and management systems are missing a huge opportunity to increase employee experience.

Here’s something perhaps even more striking: employees who say their manager recognizes them show double-digit gains across nearly every dimension of the employee experience, not just engagement. Compared to employees who don’t feel recognized by their manager, employees that DO feel recognized report incredible impact across many different indicators:

Employees who feel meaningfully recognized by their managers have:

• Goal alignment (+35 points) and work objectives (+36 points): Unsurprisingly, employees who receive manager recognition have more clarity on how their individual objectives align with the team and organization. This shows how the recognition is about reinforcing what good looks like - creating clarity and alignment for employees.
• Work-life balance (+38 points): Employees who had received recognition reported that they had a healthy work life balance, that their workload was reasonable, and that their manager did a good job of managing their work intake.
• Career prospects (+42 points): Employees who received recognition had a much more favorable perception of their career prospects than those who had not. This makes sense—when you receive recognition you naturally feel you are doing a good job and have better chances of growth and success at the company. Career prospects are critical to seeing a future with a company and wanting to stay there long term.
• Voice (+45 points): Employees who felt recognized scored more highly on whether they had a voice with the organization. This could be due to feeling more empowered in general or feeling more valued.
• Performance evaluation (+47 points): This was the biggest area of impact for recognition. Feeling recognized had a significant moderate effect on whether an employee felt their performance was evaluated fairly.

The manager recognition uplift

[[BAR CHART]]

The impacts of manager recognition speak to much of the foundations of management; setting goals, aligning employee work to organizational objectives and measuring progress against them, ensuring workloads are manageable, developing employee skill sets, and listening to employee concerns. It makes sense that manager recognition is strongly connected to all of these other management practices and can positively affect them.

Another complementary piece here is service anniversary awards. Where manager recognition is more about the day-to-day of employee experience, service anniversary awards impact some of the aspects of the employee experience that highlight the employees relationship with the company as opposed to only their manager or team. Service anniversary awards have an outsized impact on employees’ perception of how they are paid, as well as how they feel about the organization’s long-term vision and strategy.

Together, these two recognition practices build good habits and have a strong impact on the employee experience, both the day-to-day and the holistic organizational perspective.

And one final point here about senior leader recognition. While it is often the most sparsely given, its single strongest effect is on how employees feel about company values, a +32 point jump. Clearly senior leaders shape culture by modeling it, not by managing it day to day, and this year’s data is the first to show that distinction so clearly.

The dollar amount of a reward matters...to a point

Last year’s research established that a preference for meaningful rewards (team activities, company swag, personalized items) was a sign of more engagement in employees than generic cash-equivalent options like gift cards.¹ This year’s study we wanted to dig a little deeper into what “meaningful” means.

We started by looking at the amount. It’s important to acknowledge the difference between compensation and a reward in a Total Reward strategy. Compensation is our base salary or bonuses, it is the salary we are contracted to receive when we complete our work objectives or exceed those objectives. Rewards in this context refers to a different type of reward to base salary, it could be a birthday gift, a reward for completing a project or a piece of work, or a gift for reaching a milestone anniversary.

[[THREE COLORED BOXES]]

We asked employees to think of an example of this type of reward they had received from their employer, and we asked them how much it was. We then asked them how significant that reward size felt to them.

The results were enlightening!

The first signal was that there was a clear floor of how much a reward/gift needs to be to feel significant to employees. (Hint: it’s $25.) This number is true regardless of the salary band of the employee, even if that employee is paid extremely well. For leaders in any organization, if you are looking to offer employees a meaningful gift, $25 is the minimum number to shoot for.

However, there is a point of diminishing returns for rewards. While it’s true that generally, the more money you give an employee as a gift or reward, the more significant it feels, the increase in significance starts to decrease after $250. Our research shows that $100-$250 was the “sweet spot” for balancing cost against impact.

[[BELL CURVE GRAPH]]

The data supports this, too. When we asked employees why they felt a reward was significant, they said that the number one reason was the acknowledgement of a contribution and achievement—not the monetary amount. And hot on the heels of this finding is the number two reason employees felt a reward was significant: the sense of pride associated with it. The monetary value came in much lower as a reason for feeling that the reward was significant.

Why employees feel a reward is significant

1. Acknowledgement of a contribution and achievement
2. Sense of pride associated with being recognized for an achievement

And if that wasn’t enough: we uncovered some interesting findings when we looked at recognition and pay separately and their impact on engagement. There’s no doubt that pay satisfaction has an effect on employee engagement. Indeed, in our model pay satisfaction explained 21% of variance in engagement.

However, when we added recognition into the analysis, we found that there was an extra 9% variance that could be affected in engagement above and beyond just the pay. In other words, recognition has a separate, additional effect to pay perception. We also found that the effect of pay perception on engagement weakened slightly when recognition frequency increased, indicating that employees who are more recognized don’t place as much emphasis on pay when it comes to feeling more engaged.

These findings together very clearly show that recognition should strongly be considered as part of a reward strategy. Naturally a reward needs to hit a certain amount to be considered valid by employees, but at the same time, you may be leaving money on the table if you are not maximizing that amount by also ensuring that employee accomplishments are recognized and acknowledged.

And in regards to what forms of recognition move the needle on reward satisfaction, we found that two recognition practices had a negative effect on reward perception, albeit a small one. One was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not receiving any recognition at all.

The other was only receiving recognition from peers. When employees are getting reinforcement from their coworkers but that reinforcement isn’t reflected by managers or senior leaders, it leads to employees becoming less satisfied with their pay over time.

This finding alone highlights that manager recognition cadence and milestone recognition are relatively cheap, operational moves to ensure that you are reaping the benefits of your reward spend.

What’s entirely new this year: AI is changing how recognition feels

This is the one theme that didn’t exist in last year’s report at all because a year ago, AI wasn’t yet a major factor in most employees’ day-to-day work. However, that is not true today, and many employees are used to having an AI companion in their day-to-day work. This gave us the opportunity to ask them how they felt about the use of AI when it comes to recognition.

What we found was striking. We split use of AI in recognition into two categories: whether AI had been used to write the recognition (i.e. AI was responsible for writing the final product) and whether AI had been used to prompt the recognition (i.e. AI suggested that an employee had done a good job and a recognition could be a good idea).

No matter how it was used, having AI involved in the recognition had a negative impact either way. 58% of employees said that knowing that a recognition had been prompted or written by AI would make it feel less meaningful. Clearly there is still a desire from employees to preserve the human and natural nature of recognition. Recognition is a domain that needs to remain non-AI for the time being in order to feel meaningful and impactful.

Because of this finding, we were curious to know if there were other ways AI could be used to help spread recognition in an organization that did feel meaningful. To that end, we asked employees about a different use of AI: what if it was used to gather examples of recognitions that had been sent in multiple ways in the organization and collate those for the employee? Would that reduce the distaste of AI in regards to recognition?

To find out, we asked whether using AI to find examples of good recognitions would feel like a privacy breach. The answer was yes, with about 50% saying it would feel like a privacy breach, 20% staying neutral and 30% saying it would not.

But what was really interesting was when we asked whether the employee would be comfortable if this collated report of all their recognitions—i.e. all their good work—was sent to their manager. And voila, that’s where we started to see AI being a bit more accepted by the majority of respondents: 40% said they would be comfortable, 25% were neutral and 15% were negative.

This is early data, but what it signals is that if an employee believes that using AI will benefit them they will be more tolerant of it (although still wary), but that intention, benefit, and general good feeling about the technology has to come first.

[[COLORED CHART THING]]

And interestingly, this perception changes when you look at different global groups. When we looked at the same perception of AI globally, we found that the apparent discomfort isn’t the same depending on where you are based in the world. Employees in the EU are less comfortable with AI, and employees in APAC are generally more comfortable. North American employees landed somewhere in the middle.

This all matters because recognition platforms are increasingly AI-enabled, and the temptation to let AI do more of the writing is only going to grow as the technology improves. The data suggests a limit: AI can help surface who deserves recognition and when, but the moment employees sense AI is doing the feeling on a human’s behalf, the recognition loses some of its power.

Four takeaways from this year’s research to make recognition more meaningful

1. Assurez-vous d'avoir la bonne combinaison de canaux. Utilisez-vous plus de deux canaux ou vous appuyez-vous sur un seul ? Mélangez vos canaux écrits et oraux.
2. Systématisez la cadence de reconnaissance des gestionnaires et les jalons. La fréquence de reconnaissance par les gestionnaires et les anniversaires de service sont des leviers ayant un effet réel et indépendant.
3. Rendez le montant de la récompense significatif pour les primes ponctuelles. Jamais moins de 25 $, et 100 à 250 $ est le meilleur rapport qualité-prix.
4. Soyez intentionnel dans l'utilisation de l'IA. Misez sur le bénéfice pour l'employé, et il vaut mieux laisser l'IA mettre en évidence ce que les humains ont décidé d'écrire.

Recognition has major benefits that cannot be ignored, and wrapping recognition and engagement together makes it even more meaningful. Awardco® makes it easy to pull all these tools into one, and integrate with the tech stack you’re already used to. Recognition, it turns out, ages well as a strategy for engagement. It just keeps getting more precise the closer you look.

Methodology and sources

2026 Awardco data is drawn from Awardco’s Center of Excellence “COE Engage Research 2026” study: 4,792 full-time, permanent employees surveyed in May/June 2026, across 21 countries (North America, Europe, and APAC) and 11 industries, at organizations with 250+ employees. AI enablement findings are based on the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia subsample (n = 2,572–2,575). 2025-2026 baseline data is drawn from Awardco’s original State of Recognition report and research.

1. Centre d'excellence Awardco, « The State of Recognition: New Research Reveals How Recognition Impacts Teams, Builds Leaders, and Unlocks Motivation » (rapport 2025-2026).
2. Centre d'excellence Awardco, « COE Engage Research 2026 » (recherche interne, mai/juin 2026).

Then vs. now findings

[[THEN VS NOW FINDINGS]]