Recognition works.

Gallup and Workhuman followed 3,447 employees from 2022 to 2024. The people who felt well recognized were 45% less likely to have left two years later. Those receiving recognition that was authentic, personalised and part of how the company operated were 65% less likely to be looking for another job.

And yet only 22% of employees say they get the right amount of recognition for the work they do. That number did not move across the two years of the study.

So most organizations know this and still do not do it. The ones that do are working against the grain, and the people who work there can feel the difference. That is a workplace culture worth recognizing, and it is what this award is for.

We are in an unusual position to see who actually does it. We make and ship the awards, so every year we watch thousands of orders go out the door, and we can tell the difference between a company that buys one plaque for a retirement and a company that runs a real program. The second group is smaller than you would guess.

What qualifies an organization

The Excellence in Workplace Culture award goes to organizations that recognized more than 25 people over the course of a year.

That is the whole standard. No application, no survey, no fee, nothing to fill in. We look at what actually happened: how many people your organization recognized through awards it ordered during the calendar year.

In 2025, 844 organizations cleared it. That is about one in ten of the companies, schools, agencies and nonprofits we worked with, and between them they recognized 73,825 people.

Here is the part that surprised us. That one in ten accounts for roughly six of every ten awards we make. It has held at between 61 and 64 percent every year since we started the program in 2023. A small group of organizations is doing most of the recognizing, and this is the award for being in it.

Why the bar is where it is

Twenty-five is not a big number for a large employer. For a 30-person nonprofit it is most of the staff. One flat threshold cannot tell those two apart, and we would rather publish a standard we can state plainly than one that bends to fit whoever is reading it. So this measures how much recognizing an organization did, not what share of its people were reached.

Every organization clears the same bar. Businesses, schools, agencies and nonprofits are grouped separately for our own reporting, but nobody gets an easier route in.

What we have noticed

Somewhere in your building there is a shelf with an award on it. Someone put it there on purpose, and it has probably been sitting there for years.

That is what makes this work. Recognition lands when it happens more than once, and when the thing left behind outlasts the moment.

A single award at a retirement party is a kind gesture, and people appreciate it. The organizations that qualify for this are doing something different. They are recognizing someone in March, and again in July, and at the end of the year. Many have been at it long enough that their people expect it. Gallup puts the threshold at about once a week before recognition stops registering at all.

And the award itself outlasts almost everything else a company hands out. A branded jacket gets worn out. A gift card gets spent and forgotten by Thursday. An engraved piece sits on a desk for fifteen years and gets explained to every new person who asks about it.

Why we do not publish the list

We do not name the organizations that qualify. Eight hundred and more a year is a lot of names, and more to the point it is their news rather than ours. If a recipient wants to say so, the badge is there for exactly that. If they would rather not, nothing happens and nobody is listed anywhere.

About Awards.com

We have been making custom awards since 1985, and in 1997 we became one of the first places a business could design and order one online. We manufacture and engrave our own awards to order and ship to our clients and their recipients across the US & Canada and around the world.

If you are putting a recognition program together, or trying to keep one going past its first year, our team does this every day. Browse recognition awards, look at years of service awards, or call 1-800-4-AWARDS and ask.

The award does not change what these organizations do. It just says out loud what their people already know.