Recognition Companies Look Beyond Rewards to Add Strategic Value
New AI offerings from Achievers and WorkTango illustrate how traditional recognition providers are expanding into workforce intelligence and employee listening—potentially increasing their strategic value while moving into territory already occupied by HRIS and HCM platforms.Recognition Data Becomes Workforce Data
WorkTango Moves Into Continuous Listening
Where Does the HRIS End and Recognition Begin?
The Opportunity Comes With Risks
Click here to subscribe to the ESM weekly e-newsletter.
For decades, the employee recognition business was largely built around awards, points, social walls, peer-to-peer and manager-to-employee recognition, merchandise, badges and the technology needed to administer them. That model is changing as recognition companies seek to turn the enormous amount of employee interaction and behavioral data flowing through their platforms into something potentially more valuable: workforce intelligence.
Two recent developments illustrate the trend. Achievers has introduced Achievers Intelligence, designed to extract insights about skills, behaviors and organizational patterns from recognition activity, while WorkTango, recently acquired by BI WORLDWIDE, has launched Constellation, an AI-moderated employee listening platform.
Recognition companies already sit on information about what employees accomplish, who works with whom and what behaviors colleagues and managers consider worthy of recognition. If that information can be converted into credible business intelligence, recognition providers can potentially demonstrate value well beyond recognition and awards administration. Once again, no platform can be any better than the process it's designed to support.
Recognition Data Becomes Workforce Data
Achievers Intelligence is designed to analyze recognition activity to identify employee skills, strengths, behaviors and engagement patterns. Achievers describes this as a behavioral layer that can show leaders what is changing within organizations and where momentum may be building or stalling. The company also says skills can be surfaced through recognition moments based on actual work.
That represents an important shift in how recognition data can be viewed. An HR system might know an employee's job, compensation, performance rating, training and formally recorded skills. A recognition platform can potentially capture how the employee is repeatedly recognized for solving customer problems, mentoring colleagues, managing difficult projects or demonstrating particular organizational values.
Rather than attempting to become another system of record, Achievers appears to be pursuing an integration strategy. Its Connected Ecosystem is designed to make recognition intelligence available in other workplace systems, including Workday and Microsoft Copilot, and the company also promotes integrations with UKG and SAP. Achievers says this can bring recognition-generated intelligence into the applications employees and managers already use.
WorkTango Moves Into Continuous Listening
WorkTango's Constellation extends the recognition industry's reach in another direction. Launched in July, the AI-moderated listening platform is designed to conduct group employee dialogues, ask adaptive follow-up questions, identify themes and produce crowdsourced potential solutions. WorkTango says a session can involve an entire group simultaneously and generate a ranked set of suggested actions.
Constellation is available as a standalone product, making the expansion especially noteworthy. WorkTango is no longer simply adding functionality to a recognition program; it is offering technology that can potentially play a role in change management, strategic planning and other areas of organizational management. Combined with BI WORLDWIDE's acquisition of WorkTango, the development brings rewards, recognition, employee listening and behavior-change capabilities under a broader engagement umbrella.
Where Does the HRIS End and Recognition Begin?
The challenge is that major HR technology companies are moving in the same direction. Workday, for example, already offers People Analytics, skills intelligence and Peakon Employee Voice. Its analytics technology can examine such areas as retention, hiring, talent, performance, skills and employee sentiment, while Peakon provides AI-supported employee listening and analysis. This creates obvious potential for duplication. An organization could conceivably purchase employee listening, skills analysis and workforce analytics from its HCM provider, its recognition company and additional employee-experience vendors. The distinction may ultimately lie in the underlying data rather than the features.
The HRIS remains the authoritative system of record for employment and workforce information. Recognition platforms have an opportunity to become systems of interaction, capturing behavioral signals created through everyday employee activity that may never make it into formal HR records. If those signals can be integrated with HRIS data rather than creating another silo, recognition providers could add an entirely new source of workforce intelligence.
The Opportunity Comes With Risks
There is a potentially important opportunity for the recognition industry. For years, providers have been challenged to demonstrate business value beyond participation rates, points issued, awards redeemed and employee satisfaction. Connecting recognition activity with skills, behaviors, engagement and ultimately business outcomes could make recognition more relevant to senior management. The same development introduces new risks.
Recognition activity is not necessarily objective evidence of performance or capability. Popular employees may receive more recognition. Some managers recognize frequently while others rarely participate. Remote, frontline or less visible employees may generate fewer recognition moments. Cultural differences can affect recognition behavior as well. AI can find patterns in the data, but sophisticated analysis cannot by itself make incomplete or biased underlying data representative.
Employee trust presents another issue. People may view a thank-you from a colleague differently if they know the message could later contribute to assessments of their skills, performance or career potential. Organizations will need clear policies governing how recognition and listening data are analyzed, who can see the resulting insights and how those insights can be used.
The strategic opportunity for recognition companies therefore may not be to duplicate the HRIS. It is to provide information the HRIS does not naturally capture and make that information useful within the organization's existing technology infrastructure.
If recognition companies can demonstrate that these behavioral and employee-generated signals improve decisions and organizational performance, they could substantially expand the industry's value proposition. If the new services merely reproduce analytics available elsewhere, buyers may instead discover that they have purchased another layer of HR technology without gaining substantially better intelligence.
Enterprise Engagement Alliance Services
Celebrating our 17th year, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance helps organizations enhance performance through:1. Information and marketing opportunities on stakeholder management and total rewards:
- ESM Weekly on stakeholder management since 2009. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- RRN Weekly on total rewards since 1996. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- EEA YouTube channel on enterprise engagement, human capital, and total rewards since 2020
Management Academy to enhance future equity value for your organization.3. Books on implementation: Enterprise Engagement for CEOs and Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap.
4. Advisory services and research: Strategic guidance, learning and certification on stakeholder management, measurement, metrics, and corporate sustainability reporting.
5. Permission-based targeted business development to identify and build relationships with the people most likely to buy.
Contact: Bruce Bolger at TheICEE.org; 914-591-7600, ext. 230.
