Recognition truly is a cornerstone of PMG’s culture because it fuels engagement, strengthens relationships, and reinforces the behaviors that drive our success. It allows you to immediately recognize big and small wins where that impact is immediately felt.

Within AOCC, we’ve built peer nominations into the process. The more recognitions a team member receives, the more points they earn toward winning a High Flyer award. This has fostered real cohesion, inclusivity, and teamwork across the department.

What I love most is the reporting aspect. It's something that reinforces the impact of Awardco, and it shows that the work we're doing is paying off.

The product that we're putting out is a lot of fun, but it is not easy to do what we do every single week. People are working really, really hard, and if they feel like just another cog in the machine, that can get disheartening really quickly. Taking that extra time to show appreciation for above-and-beyond effort is really important and reinforces good relationships.

We recently pulled an in-platform report to check on usage, and then we reached out to people individually to improve adoption—especially managers. Since then, engagement has been significantly higher, and our culture of recognition is growing—even our executives are recognizing.

I’ve been able to see how much recognition has changed since we started using Awardco. From an admin perspective, it’s become so much more manageable and has saved me countless hours. Birthdays, anniversaries, and new-hire milestones are all automated through Workday, new hires get points at 30 and 60 days, and employees are recognized automatically for birthdays and anniversaries.

I’ve been recognized myself, and it felt wonderful—surprising, but also deeply motivating. I’ve also had the privilege of recognizing teams for delivering major projects, which brought departments together in a unified sense of achievement.

People like to be recognized for what they’ve contributed. They’re proud of their work—and they should be.

Everybody wants to come to work every day and feel as though they're making a meaningful contribution to the business. So, when you finally get to hear that what you've been working so hard on has made an impact, it's incredibly rewarding.

If we retain a teacher, that’s 20 students we get to serve. Going from 45% turnover to 8% means we’ve kept 85–90 more staff. That’s an incredible impact on both our children and our budget.

With Awardco we now have more visibility into our incentive budgets than ever, and can be more judicious about our incentive spend.

How do we better recognize our associates on the day to day? One of our engagement survey questions is, 'In the last seven days, have you been recognized for doing good work?' Awardco really allows us to to do that and to do a better job of that.

We strive to create a high performance culture. If we're looking for certain actions and mindsets, we should celebrate them when they happen and find creative and frequent ways to recognize and appreciate the hard work behind them.

Before Awardco Nominations, we had to piece everything together manually. Now everything lives in one place, making the process much easier and more intuitive.

Our turnover definitely went down after implementing Awardco, especially compared to the previous year. We've noticed that recognition, along with rewards like Amazon items and prepaid Visa cards, has had a big impact on retention without being a huge cost to the company.