Discover how Achievers empowers global HR teams with employee recognition, engagement, and performance tools designed to build stronger workplace cultures
Want to build a great company culture? Start by encouraging your leaders and employees to recognize their direct reports and peers more often. Studies have shown that frequent recognition – at least once a month – fosters a sense of belonging, which translates to higher productivity, engagement, and retention.
Behind these studies is Achievers, an employee recognition and rewards software. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the platform, what it offers, and how it might benefit organizations. We’ll also go over some of the research they’ve produced on the science behind frequent recognition and belonging.
Achievers is a cloud-based employee rewards and recognition platform designed to build a culture of belonging within organizations. Everyone – not just managers – can share kudos and feedback with each other.
It's more than a thank you program – it's a tool that helps build a strong company culture through recognition and belonging. Achievers gives everyone the tools to recognize their colleagues every day, wherever they are.
Achievers is accessible on the web or on the mobile app, making the practice of frequent recognition even easier for employees. It can also accommodate hybrid, fully remote, or office-based environments.
Achievers is an all-in-one platform for:
The Achievers platform is centered on employee participation, providing businesses a tool where the entire workforce can recognize each other, celebrate great moments, and give honest feedback.
Let’s go over these features in more detail:
Achievers offers companies the following solutions:
Recognize is an employee engagement and recognition tool that allows the workforce to commend their peers, managers, and direct reports in real time. This can be done directly through apps where they work and connect.
Recognize is designed to encourage frequent and purposeful recognition.
When recognizing someone for a job well done, you can attach points and rewards for them to claim prizes on Reward. It's a marketplace featuring over 3 million products from more than 2,500 brands. These are available across 190 countries, localized to suit your employee’s preferences wherever they are in the world.
Incentives are not limited to merchandise. Companies can offer experiences such as travel, dining, and wellness activities.
Employees can choose from options that resonate with them personally, making the reward even more valuable. This flexibility contributes to a more inclusive and empowering recognition strategy.
Listen provides companies with an integrated and flexible toolkit to collect feedback from employees. This toolkit includes science-backed surveys aimed at measuring and managing all areas of employment.
Listen also comes with a content library consisting of best practices and templates for a range of projects, including corporate social responsibility and employee wellness and safety initiatives.
These features give business leaders a bird’s eye view of their organization’s health and HR professionals insights on problems and opportunities. These also allow managers to take real-time action to address issues.
Achievers brings together employees, managers, and company leaders through Connect. Your organization can use this tool for:
This helps develop a sense of community across your organization, whether in person or virtual.
You and your workforce can mark important occasions such as:
Employees can sign electronic cards to mark a special occasion for their peers. Awards nominations can be tracked via Celebrate as well. You can also give a gift or token to an employee via points or marketplace rewards.
Achievers has a list of platform integration partners that help simplify employee engagement:
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360 Learning |
Microsoft Teams |
|---|---|
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ADP |
Microsoft Viva |
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Gmail |
Salesforce |
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Google Chat |
Slack |
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Google Cloud |
Workday |
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Google Workspace |
UKG |
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Microsoft Outlook |
Zebra |
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Microsoft SharePoint |
Zoom |
Achievers also features an open API, allowing the program to easily integrate with different workplace applications.
The platform is compatible with a range of human resources information systems (HRIS), enabling companies to use information directly from their existing systems. Achiever’s list of HRIS partners include:
Achievers is a certified Workday Gold Tier Innovation Partner. For more details on Workday as an HCM software, read our software review on Workday.
The website does not show Achievers pricing packages upfront – you'll need to contact their sales team first for a demo.
You’ll need to fill in a form with basic information about you and the organization you represent. One of the details you’ll need to give is company size.
If you’ve entered anything below 1,000 under company size, you’ll find that Achievers might not be an option for you. Their services and pricing plans work for organizations with at least 1,000 employees.
If you meet that requirement, Achievers will contact you within one business day. You can also ask for a live demo.
Achievers does have an ROI calculator that can help you decide if they’re worth the investment. The ROI calculator will ask for some bits of information:
Enter your email address to get a breakdown of costs and potential ROI for your company. The ROI calculator only works for mid-sized enterprises and up.
If your company isn’t a good match for the Achievers platform, you can still make use of some freebies they offer. At the bottom of the Achievers homepage, you’ll see a free tools section where you can download guides and checklists.
Our favorite is “send an appreciation card.” It’s very easy to use:
Try the free tool and track early signs of improved engagement, well-being, and employee morale. Even small shifts can signal lasting cultural change.
Achievers boasts what it calls best-in-class customer care:
These numbers make a huge difference, especially as delays in resolving tech issues can be frustrating.
We haven’t had the chance to test Achievers’ customer service (we didn’t meet the employee minimum), but their awards speak for themselves. The company has received accolades in these subcategories from various bodies:
Achievers also assigns dedicated customer success managers (CSMs) to guide clients through onboarding, adoption, and continued use of the platform. These CSMs work with HR teams to maximize platform engagement.
One way to find out how Achievers really works is to hear from the clients themselves. The Achievers website has a section called customer stories. Here they share case studies of successful workplace culture transformations using Achievers.
Air Canada is one of the case studies featured. In this video, the airline company talks about the Achievers’ customer service team and how involved they are in Air Canada’s success:
Here are more insights from HRD’s 2021 interview with Achievers on how to get employee recognition right.
From what we have seen, there are four offerings that make Achievers stand out:
Let’s take a closer look at each:
Not all HR software providers offer 24/7 service, but Achievers does. They provide support worldwide in over 200 languages. Having someone to contact anytime you face issues with the platform is a huge relief!
Achievers’ customer service stats – 98 percent satisfaction rate and 95 percent customer retention rate – are no small feat. They look after over 400 companies, so that’s a lot of happy customers.
According to Achievers, their software has the highest active usage compared to competitors. Achievers users are four times more likely to use the platform compared to other employee recognition software.
Frequent recognition is at the heart of Achievers’ Belonging Model. It states that a sense of belonging boosts every people metric that HR leaders look at:
A strong sense of belonging is rooted in frequent recognition practices. And because the Achievers platform is user-friendly and engaging, using it promotes the practice of recognizing colleagues even more.
Achievers developed the Belonging Model which outlines five key pillars:
Each feature of the Achievers platform highlights at least one of these pillars. When employees use the platform to recognize frequently, that practice builds a culture of belonging. And that, in turn, leads to employee satisfaction, engagement, and retention.
Watch this video to see how General Motors used Achievers to help grow a culture of belonging:
The Achievers Workforce Institute (AWI) is the research arm of Achievers. It’s made up of a team of workforce and data experts that produces thought leadership pieces to help business leaders around the world.
AWI uses proven methods from workforce science to create better results at work. To share their findings, AWI produces:
The Belonging Model is the cornerstone research of AWI, but they have other resources available. The Achievers website has a dedicated AWI section for HR professionals who'd like to know more about the science behind recognition and belonging.
Headquarters address: 99 Atlantic Avenue, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M6K3J8, Canada
Year established: 2002
Number of employees: 500 to 1,000
Global locations: Canada, UK, US, Australia, Singapore
Businesses served: 400+
Key people: Scott Landers (CEO), Chris Fudge (CMO), Anu Subramanian (CTO), Bob Memmer (CRO), Kristian Gaetano (COO), Larry Vertin (CFO), Hannah Yardley (CHRO)
Achievers was founded in 2002 as I Love Rewards by Canadian entrepreneur Razor Suleman. He later rebranded the company to Achievers in 2011.
Today, Achievers is an award-winning HR platform with accolades from experts in tech and customer service. It won gold in the rewards and recognition category in HRD Australia and New Zealand's Service Provider Awards 2023.
Achievers is in the business of showing gratitude through small gifts and positive action. Watch CEO Scott Landers talk about the impact of a small gesture on a boy he met 30 years ago:
Based on the information on their website and testimonials from clients, Achievers is a brand to reckon with in the rewards and recognition market. Some strong selling points include their award-winning customer service, user-friendly platform, and groundbreaking research in recognition and belonging.
But Achievers is not for everyone. It’s built for larger organizations (at least 1,000 employees). Companies with a global workforce stand to benefit most from Achievers’ products and services.
If you’re part of a smaller organization that’s looking for a rewards and recognition software, here are others for you to consider. We’ve written reviews on them too!
Whether you go with Achievers or any similar program, remember that frequent recognition has far-reaching benefits. Encourage your leaders and employees to be generous with recognizing a job well done. As we have seen, these small changes lead to lasting impact.
Would you consider Achievers for your company’s employee engagement and recognition initiatives? Tell us in the comments section below
