Another Recognition Works is officially in the books, and we’re still thinking about so many of the conversations from the day.

On September 17, 2026,  HR and People leaders joined us for a full day focused on recognition, retention, performance, leadership, AI, culture and what’s coming next. We heard from recognition expert Sarah McVanel, leaders from JRI Hospitality, Nexus Family Healing, Esler Companies and Storable, and experts from across the employee experience space.

We were also lucky to have Bravely, Achieve Network and SelectSoftware Reviews join us as sponsors this year, bringing their own expertise in leadership, coaching, recognition strategy and HR technology to the day.

There were a lot of different perspectives in the room, but one question kept coming back:

How do you make recognition actually work for your business?

How do you make recognition meaningful? How do you help people feel seen? How do you get managers bought in and actively involved? And how do you connect all of that to the things your organization actually cares about, like retention, performance and culture?

Here are a few of the ideas that stuck with us most.

1. Recognition starts with a very human question

Sarah McVanel, recognition expert, coach and author, opened the day with a question that set the tone for everything that followed:

Do I matter here?

Sarah talked about recognition as one of the simplest ways we can help people answer that question with a yes. When people feel seen, heard and valued, they understand that their work matters, their effort matters and their contribution matters.

It was a good reminder that before recognition becomes a program, a platform or a business strategy, it is a human interaction. Someone did something that mattered. Someone else noticed.

Jason Lindstrom, CEO and Co-Founder of Bucketlist Rewards, picked up that thread in his keynote, Recognition Matters. What It Builds Matters More. His focus was on what begins to happen when those individual moments become consistent across an organization. Recognition can make values more tangible, strengthen connection and help employees see how their work contributes to something bigger.

That human foundation stayed with us all day, even as the conversations moved into data, performance and technology.

2. The data makes a strong case for better recognition, not just more recognition

Yannick Provencher, I/O Psychology Advisor at Bucketlist Rewards, brought the research into the conversation with The Recognition Impact Gap: Why Some Programs Change Behavior and Others Don’t.

His analysis from the Bucketlist Recognition Lab looked at 3,165 survey responses and explored two parts of the recognition experience: how often recognition happens and how it feels when it does. The research looked at how those experiences were associated with engagement, satisfaction and employees’ thoughts about leaving.

A few findings really stood out:

• 54% of employees reported receiving recognition from a leader less than once a month. For peer recognition, it was 45%.
• Employees who received leader recognition at least monthly were more likely to meet the engagement threshold, 71% compared with 59% among employees recognized less often.
• Recognition quality showed an even wider gap. 75% of employees reporting high-quality recognition met the engagement threshold, compared with 48% among those reporting low-quality recognition.
• Among employees reporting high-quality recognition, 87% were satisfied with their company as a place to work, compared with 46% in the low-quality group. Regular thoughts about leaving were also lower, 8% compared with 28%.

What makes high-quality recognition? Yannick’s research broke it down into four things: it should feel genuine, timely, personalized and fair. Fairness was the weakest part of the experience, with only 54% agreeing that similar contributions were recognized fairly across their organization.

There is a practical lesson in that. Recognition needs enough frequency for people to have a chance to be noticed, but the moment still has to mean something when it arrives.

3. Recognition has to work where the work happens

Some of our favorite conversations came from leaders figuring out how to make recognition stick with large frontline teams.

Eric Clark, Chief Culture and Communications Officer at JRI Hospitality, joined Rebecca Krekelberg, VP of Talent Strategy at Nexus Family Healing, for a conversation about recognition and performance. Their organizations look very different, but both are trying to solve a similar challenge: how do you consistently notice and reinforce great work when employees are spread across locations, shifts and teams?

JRI Hospitality has roughly 7,500 employees, and Eric talked about recognition as something much bigger than a reward program. One line from his session captured it well:

Recognition has to become more of a leadership behavior than a reward strategy.

For JRI, that means looking beyond the final scoreboard and recognizing the behaviors that help create the result in the first place.

A few ideas from JRI stood out:

• Recognize the behavior behind the number. Great service, teamwork and leadership happen before the final KPI shows up.
• Use recognition as part of coaching. Positive feedback gives employees a clearer picture of what great performance looks like.
• Make it visible. Eric talked about recognition becoming something employees actively pay attention to, including friendly competition around participation and leaderboards.

For frontline and deskless teams, there is a bigger visibility challenge at play. The people closest to the customer are often the furthest from leadership, which makes accessible and timely recognition especially important.

Healthcare brought another side of that challenge to life

Nexus Family Healing is a national nonprofit mental health organization with about 1,500 employees across five states. Becky talked about the reality of supporting employees doing difficult, emotionally demanding work and the importance of helping people feel seen across different programs, agencies and locations.

Nexus has found some practical ways to keep recognition connected to the work:

• Recognition is tied back to organizational values, helping employees understand which behaviors the organization wants to keep seeing.
• The team has run a professional behaviors campaign alongside its broader recognition program, giving leaders another way to focus attention on behaviors that might otherwise be taken for granted.
• Nexus looks at recognition alongside broader retention and turnover trends, rather than treating participation as the only measure of success.

That frontline and healthcare perspective mattered. Recognition can be easy to talk about from an office. It is much harder to make it consistent across a hospital, residential treatment centre, restaurant or busy shift where managers are moving just as quickly as everyone else.

4. Managers kept coming up for a reason

One theme showed up everywhere. In speaker conversations, attendee questions and the chat, people kept coming back to managers.

HR can build the strategy and give people the tools, but managers are the ones closest to so many of the moments worth recognizing. They see the employee who handled a difficult customer conversation well, helped a teammate through a rough shift or quietly kept a project moving.

Our retention conversation made that especially clear.

Katie Kleyla, Director of Teammate Experience at Esler Companies, and Nicole Tenneyuque, Senior Manager of Global Engagement and Impact at Storable, talked about the signals organizations should pay attention to before someone decides to leave.

Katie shared a simple practice that we loved: ask employees how they want to be recognized during onboarding. 

Some people love being called out publicly. Others would rather get a thoughtful message from their manager. Asking early makes recognition more personal, and it gets managers thinking about recognition as part of leadership from the beginning.

Nicole’s point tied back to Yannick’s earlier session on the four things that matter for high-quality recognition: genuine, timely, personalized and fair. She shared that recognition works best when it happens close to the contribution and clearly explains what someone did well. It can also carry more weight when it comes directly from a manager or senior leader.

Sarah Sheehan, Co-Founder and CEO of Bravely, and Maureen Kennedy, Head of Coaching, took the manager conversation even further. They talked about recognition as a leadership habit, not something HR should have to chase managers to do. At Bravely, for example, Sarah shared that the team deliberately carves out time during weekly all-hands meetings for shoutouts tied to company values, while still leaving room for unexpected, in-the-moment recognition.

A few practical ideas came out of the manager conversations throughout the day:

• Build recognition into habits managers already have, like one-on-ones, team meetings and coaching conversations.
• Give managers clarity on what to recognize, especially when the behaviors connect back to company values or business priorities.
• Pay attention to who is being missed. Visible teams and obvious wins are easier to recognize than quieter work happening behind the scenes.
• Use data to spot gaps. Recognition patterns can tell HR where certain teams or leaders may need more support.

Zech Dahms, President of Achieve Network, and Vanessa Cannizzaro, VP of Talent Management and Operations at Intelerad, brought a useful framework to this conversation through the Achieve Appreciation Wheel. Their advice was to listen first to employees and the business before designing the program, then build from there with recognition that is genuine, specific and consistent.

Manager buy-in is not one more box to check after a recognition program launches. It is part of the strategy from the beginning.

5. Technology should help us notice more without taking the human part away

AI came up throughout the day too, but the best conversations were not about automating everything.

In a session sponsored by SelectSoftware Reviews, Phil Strazzulla, Founder of SSR, and Paul Carney, former CHRO and AI educator, explored what HR should automate, where AI can assist and which decisions should stay firmly human. Paul talked about keeping coaching, discipline and high-stakes employee decisions in human hands, while using AI to help with the work around them.

That idea connected neatly to how Sarah Sheehan described using AI at Bravely. She shared an example of AI helping surface moments from meetings that may deserve recognition, giving managers a prompt to act rather than replacing the recognition itself.

The theme was pretty consistent: technology can help us notice, remember and understand more. People still give the moment meaning.

Recognition is becoming more connected to the work itself

We closed the day with Joe Marconato, President and COO of Bucketlist Rewards, and Day Kirby, Senior Product Manager, sharing a first look at where Bucketlist is headed.

A big part of that vision is bringing recognition closer to the work itself.

Joe introduced Smart Awards, which can connect Bucketlist to the systems where employees are already working and recognize performance moments as they happen. He shared examples across sales, learning and development, safety, attendance and shift coverage.

The idea is simple: important work should not go unrecognized just because a manager did not happen to see it.

Joe described the bigger goal this way:

We’re just really focused on trying to connect that overall company goals to the individual level.

The team also previewed Spark and Bucketlist Intelligence, designed to help HR leaders understand what is happening across their recognition program, build custom reports, identify patterns and get recommendations for what to do next. Joe outlined a path from reporting, to recommending, to eventually helping with more of the administrative work while keeping the HR leader as the decision-maker.

It felt like a fitting way to end the day. We started with the deeply human question of whether people know they matter, and finished by looking at how recognition can become more timely, more visible and more connected to the work people are already doing.

Until next year

Recognition Works is always one of our favorite events because of the people who show up for it.

A huge thank-you to every speaker who shared their experience and ideas, to Bravely, Achieve Network and SelectSoftware Reviews for helping make the day possible, and to every attendee who joined us, asked questions and shared what recognition looks like inside their own organization.

There is a lot we are still thinking about, but one idea feels like the right way to wrap it all up:

Recognition changes behavior. Behavior changes business.

Recognition Works 2026 may be over, but we hope the conversations from the day keep going.

Missed a session or want to watch one again? Watch the Recognition Works 2026 recordings.

Want to keep the conversation going? Talk to a Recognition Expert