Colleagues have to choose a value from The Collaborative Way when they recognize, making our recognition feed daily proof of why our values are so important. It’s such a powerfully positive place. Leaders are really taking notice—they want to see their teams at the top of the adoption leaderboard because they know the impact our values have on employee performance and retention.

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.

The High Flyer program has made a significant difference in how our teams perform and work together. One of my shifts has won the award twice this year, and you can see the motivation and pride reflected in their daily behaviors.

We needed something to unify our recognition programs for all our different locations, and we found that and more with Awardco.

When we unified our recognition programs, we saw a strong correlation between recognition and employee engagement. Teams led by managers who consistently recognized their people were the most engaged.

We do a lot of remote work activities where you can win something. We do a lot of these contests, and I used to go to Amazon and send a $25 gift card to the winners, but now I do it through Awardco. It's in the system, trackable, and much more streamlined.

Prior to Awardco, the recognition process was manual and time-consuming. Everything was done through emails and spreadsheets, with physical delivery of plaques and gifts. Important milestones were sometimes missed, despite our best intentions.

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.