Agenda

Book dedicated time with Awardco specialists before the full event kicks off. Whether you want to dig into recognition strategy, explore platform functionality, or get a demo from a Solutions Engineer, these focused 1:1 sessions are designed to give you personalized answers before the main programming begins.

Have a challenge you're working through? A win worth sharing? Braindates are peer-to-peer conversation sessions designed to get the right people talking to each other. Sign up to host or join a discussion on any recognition topic you're navigating—from program design to executive buy-in to frontline engagement. Some of the best insights at Summit don't come from the stage, but from connections with peers.

Get focused time with a member of Awardco's Center of Excellence. Bring your real questions—about program design, recognition strategy, maturity, or wherever you're feeling stuck—and walk away with practical guidance tailored to your organization. These sessions fill up fast; book early.

Want to see what's possible before the main event kicks off? Sit down with an Awardco Solutions Engineer for a personalized walkthrough of the platform—whether you want to explore a specific feature, see how other organizations have configured their programs, or just make sure you're getting the most out of Awardco.

Get a head start on Summit. Pick up your badge and materials early, skip the morning rush, and start building the connections that will carry you through the next three days.

Start Summit with intention. This guided practice combines mindful reflection with restorative sound healing using crystal singing bowls to create space for clarity, presence, and renewal. Leave feeling grounded, recharged, and ready for the week ahead. Presented by ALO

Kick off RCGNZ Summit 2026 in style. Join fellow HR and business leaders for an elevated evening of food, drinks, and conversation as we set the tone for three days of bold ideas and meaningful connections. Theme and details to come.

Fuel up and get oriented. Pick up your badge, grab breakfast, and explore the Product Expo and sponsor booths before the morning program begins. Make connections and network before the room gets moving.

Pause, reset, and reconnect. Through guided meditation and accessible breathwork, you'll quiet the mind, sharpen focus, and restore your energy. Leave with simple techniques you can return to throughout your day. Presented by ALO

Awardco CEO Steve Sonnenberg and Paige Bennett Carr officially open Summit 2026. Get the lay of the land, hear what's ahead, and settle into three days built around one idea: Recognize What's Next.

In this future-of-work keynote, Heather shows that organizations can change at breakneck speed when they tap into humans’ capacity to adapt. Using vivid stories (like a mop, a burrito, and a hermit crab), she reframes “resistance to change” as an untapped asset—curiosity and collaboration—that can be directed toward what’s next. Leaders learn to move from reacting to disruption to using it as a strategic advantage.

Attendees will learn to:

- Frame better questions that surface problems worth solving

- Adapt faster to new realities with clear mental models for change

- Spot hidden opportunities by mapping patterns from past to future

What does the data actually say about what drives people right now? Awardco's Center of Excellence returns to the mainstage to unveil new original research on employee motivation, recognition effectiveness, and what HR leaders need to know heading into the next era of work. Expect honest findings, practical implications, and a framework you can take back to your team.

Executive recognition matters, but it often breaks down in practice. Leaders are stretched thin, time constraints, distance from the day-to-day, uncertainty around who to recognize, and fear of being inconsistent all create friction at the top. In this mainstage session, Steve Sonnenberg and Awardco’s Center of Excellence unpack why executive recognition stalls, why that gap matters, and how leaders can solve it in a practical, scalable way. Through a live look at Awardco’s AI MCP, Steve and Christi will show how executives can identify meaningful moments, recognize with confidence, and create visible leadership behavior that drives recognition across the organization.

Get a first look at where Awardco is taking recognition next. The Awardco product team takes the stage to spotlight major releases, share innovation on the horizon, and show—through real client stories—how the platform is evolving to meet the complexity of modern workforce needs. If you want to know what's possible, this is the session to be in.

Scaling recognition across countries, cultures, and time zones is one of the hardest problems in HR. In this featured client story, hear how a global organization tackled the complexity of multinational rollout—and what it actually took to make recognition feel meaningful at every level of a distributed workforce.

Recharge and keep the conversations going. Grab lunch and spend time in the Product and Sponsor Expo—connect with Awardco product leaders, explore partner solutions, and get inspired by what's possible for your recognition program.

Engagement doesn't happen by accident—it's designed. Hear from HR leaders who have built recognition-centered engagement strategies that don't just spark initial participation, but sustain momentum over time. From launch to long-term adoption, they'll share the decisions that made the difference.

Designing recognition across a global workforce is about far more than launching a platform. Organizations must navigate cultural differences, language considerations, governance models, compliance requirements, budget strategies, and varying employee expectations, all while maintaining a consistent employee experience. Join the Center of Excellence and a panel of Awardco customers as they share how they approached global rollout strategies, balanced global consistency with local relevance, measured success, and overcame challenges along the way. Whether you're exploring a pilot, planning a phased expansion, or optimizing an existing global program, you'll leave with practical strategies, lessons learned, and actionable insights from organizations that have successfully scaled recognition across regions and cultures.

Nominations are one of the most powerful and most underutilized tools in a recognition strategy. When done well, they create moments of visibility that reinforce values, drive participation across the entire organization, and spotlight contributions that might otherwise go unnoticed. In this session, the Center of Excellence and client practitioners share how to design a successful nomination program: from setting the right criteria and building a submission process people will use, to operationalizing nominations at scale and using them to tell the story of your culture. Includes a look at how leading organizations are using Awardco's nominations functionality to launch new recognition moments and increase program momentum.

Deskless employees are often the hardest to reach with recognition, communication, and culture. In this panel discussion, Awardco Center of Excellence leaders and client practitioners will share what’s working across frontline, field-based, and offline teams, including practical ways to increase visibility, reduce friction, and make recognition more relevant in the flow of work. Attendees will leave with ideas they can apply to better engage hard-to-reach populations.

What separates a good recognition program from a great one? This panel spotlights creative, high-impact approaches from Awardco clients across industries who are pushing the boundaries of what recognition can do—and the results they've earned because of it.

Traditional service awards often miss the mark. Join Laura Shanley of Awardco’s Center of Excellence and get a peek into JPMorgan’s recognition strategy, and how they built their best-in-class service award programs using Awardco’s MemoryBooks®. Discover new approaches that make recognition more timely, meaningful, and impactful, and learn how modernizing service awards (and facilitating new programs like JPMC’s “Employee Recognition Week”) will boost engagement, increase retention, and celebrate employees when it matters most.

Recognition is a business strategy—but proving it requires more than instinct. In this practical, case-study-driven session, COE leaders walk through how to build an executive-ready ROI story, uncover hidden budget, and make the case for investment at every level of leadership. Back by popular demand.

Benefits are table stakes. Culture is the differentiator. HR leaders from organizations known for standout employee experience share the blueprint behind recognition strategies that actually build culture, align with organizational goals, and drive the kind of engagement that no perks package can replicate.

Building a recognition program that works at enterprise scale requires more than a platform—it requires strategy, change management, and executive alignment. In this featured client conversation, hear how one organization evolved their approach, navigated complexity, and made recognition a true business lever across a large, distributed workforce.

Join us for a special fireside chat designed to spark fresh thinking, unexpected perspective, and meaningful conversation. The guest remains under wraps for now, but this is one session you won’t want to miss.

Keep the energy going before the evening begins. Visit the Product and Sponsor Expo, drop into Center Of Excellence Office Hours for a strategy conversation, or find a peer you've been meaning to talk to all day. This is the unscheduled time that somehow becomes the most valuable hour of Summit.

Close out Day 2 with an evening of celebration, community, and well-earned recognition. The Recognize Awards Ceremony spotlights this year's honorees, and the night wraps with entertainment, connection, and the kind of energy that only comes from being in a room full of people who genuinely care about their people.

Release tension and restore mobility through a slow, supportive Yin yoga practice. Longer-held poses help ease stiffness from travel and long days of sitting while improving flexibility, creating space to move with greater ease and balance. Presented by ALO

Ease into the final day with breakfast and one more pass through the Expo. Connect with sponsors, revisit a product conversation, or simply catch up with peers over coffee before the morning program begins.

Steve Sonnenberg and Paige Bennett Carr open Day 3, recap the energy from yesterday, and set the stage for a morning of powerful keynotes and actionable sessions.

The old tools of success got us here. They won’t take us where we need to go next.

Today’s most effective leaders—especially those responsible for culture, recognition, and engagement—are grappling with a hidden paradox: the very excellence that built their credibility is quietly working against them.

In organizations navigating constant change—new technologies, new workforce expectations, hybrid realities, global teams, and always-on pressure—doing what’s always worked is no longer enough. In fact, it can become the fastest path to burnout, stagnation, or being unintentionally sidelined.

In this provocative and energizing keynote, Henna Pryor, CSP, Workplace Performance Expert and 2x TEDx speaker, flips the script on what modern excellence really looks like. Through powerful storytelling, behavioral science, and deeply practical tools, Henna shows leaders how to train the mental and social muscles required to thrive in a world that refuses to slow down.

This session is especially resonant for leaders who are often the emotional backbone of their organizations—designing recognition strategies, stewarding culture, and guiding others through uncertainty, while rarely being recognized themselves.

Together, we explore:

- Identifying our personal Mindset Monkey Wrenches, the invisible habits that quietly cap performance

- Why toxic positivity fails in real leadership moments (and what works instead)

- The #1 tool leaders need when everything feels urgent and unclear: Neutral Thinking

- Your multi-step action plan for resetting and moving through any change that come your way

With strategies that stick and stories audiences will still be thinking about weeks later, this keynote equips leaders to operate with clarity, confidence, and agency—especially when the pressure is on.

Healthcare organizations face some of the most demanding recognition challenges in any industry. In this featured mainstage case study, hear directly from healthcare leaders about how recognition has become a tool for reducing burnout, retaining clinical staff, and building the kind of culture that supports both their people and their patients.

AI is changing the way people work, communicate, and lead, but what does that actually mean for recognition? In this session, the Center of Excellence and a panel of Awardco customers will share where AI is proving genuinely useful today, from helping people write stronger recognition messages and improve nomination quality to surfacing insights and supporting better program decisions. Just as importantly, they’ll explore the guardrails that keep recognition authentic, credible, and human. Attendees will leave with practical ideas, real examples, and a clearer view of how recognition can strengthen connection and culture in an increasingly AI-shaped workplace.

Recognition data is only as powerful as what you do with it. In this session, learn how to use engagement surveys, feedback loops, and platform data to continuously improve your recognition program—and how to bring employee sentiment into the strategic conversations that shape your culture.

Your recognition program is already delivering value—here's how to prove it. In this workshop-style session, COE leaders walk through the three dimensions of Return on Recognition and give you the tools to measure, communicate, and defend your program's impact to stakeholders at every level.

Research continues to show that psychologically safe cultures are more resilient, productive, and more likely to retain people, and that recognition can help employees feel more seen, supported, and connected.

In this panel discussion, Awardco Center of Excellence leaders and client practitioners will share how they use recognition to strengthen belonging, support wellbeing, and build trust in everyday moments. Attendees will leave with practical ideas for creating recognition experiences that feel more human and help teams stay connected through change, stress, and growth.

Going live is a milestone, not the finish line. Organizations that achieve long-term success treat recognition as an ongoing change journey rather than a one-time implementation. Join Awardco's Center of Excellence for an interactive workshop focused on sustaining engagement, scaling adoption, and embedding recognition into everyday culture. Through guided reflection and practical planning activities, you'll leave with concrete actions you can take to strengthen your program and drive lasting impact.

In this hands-on workshop, Awardco product experts walk through the features, configurations, and strategies to help you identify practical ways to improve adoption, visibility, and admin efficiency. Join this session for an optimization framework that will help you map your current state to your next best moves.

Recognition has real business value, but getting leaders to invest in it, designing the right approach, and proving that it worked are three different challenges. This workshop tackles all three. First, attendees will use a practical change framework to assess their current recognition experience and build a stronger case for investment. Then, they’ll identify the key design choices that shape an effective recognition strategy from the start. Finally, they’ll explore how to measure impact across program efficiency, cultural outcomes, and business performance using practical metrics and examples. Attendees will leave with a clearer case, a stronger strategy, and a more credible approach to measuring results.

Switching vendors or relaunching a stalled program is one of the highest-stakes moments in a recognition leader's career. Get a practical change management roadmap that de-risks your transition, helps you design for adoption from day one, and shows you how to use the moment of change as a catalyst for building something better.

A final chance to connect with peers, visit remaining expo booths, and gather your thoughts before the closing mainstage sessions.

We're saving this one. All we can say right now is that the closing day of RCGNZ Summit 2026 includes a special guest you won't see coming—and won't forget. The kind of voice that makes a room go quiet and leave buzzing. Stay tuned for the announcement, and trust us: you'll want to be in that seat.

You’ve got people sitting on gold—but it’s buried under fear, permission-seeking, or “not yet.”

And it’s costing you—innovation, opportunities, engagement, even customers.

But this isn’t a development issue. It’s an ownership issue.

You already have the talent. You already have the resources. What you’re missing is activation. That’s exactly what FlyGirl does.

Vernice “FlyGirl” Armour brings real-world urgency, unshakable presence, and a message your people can’t un-hear. She cuts through performance posturing, dismantles limiting beliefs, and replaces ‘safe leadership’ with self-led power.

OWN YOUR LEADERSHIP™ isn’t a motivational moment. It’s a leadership shift—one your people will feel, live, and act on long after the applause ends.ers to operate with clarity, confidence, and agency—especially when the pressure is on.

Steve Sonnenberg and the Paige Bennett Carr close out Summit 2026. A moment to reflect on what you've heard, who you've met, and what you're taking back. Recognition is how we make the future feel worth building—and this is where we send you out to do exactly that.