If you've ever rolled out a recognition program and watched it thrive at head office while going quiet everywhere else, you already understand the problem we set out to solve this quarter.
Recognition has a habit of rewarding the employees who are easiest to reach and skipping the ones who are hardest to reach, and on the frontline that means the people doing your most visible work often go the longest without hearing that it mattered.
In stores, plants, hospitals, warehouses, and casinos, a huge share of employees have no company email, no company device, and no spare moment to log into a separate platform during a shift, so the recognition that would mean the most to them tends to quietly never arrive. That gap was the throughline of our latest quarterly webinar, Recognition That Reaches Everyone, featuring Cameron Waind, Senior Product Manager and Kwesi Thomas, Executive HR Advisor, who spent twenty-five years building total rewards and recognition programs at companies like BlackBerry, Nortel, and Shopify before advising HR teams full time.
The session walked through three parts of the product built specifically for reaching frontline teams: deeper integrations, a rebuilt mobile app, and offline recognition that works even when someone has no email and can't carry a phone on the floor. What follows is the recap, with the three highest-impact moments clipped and timestamped so you can jump straight to them, the data that explains why this deserves your attention, and a few concrete things you can do with your own program this quarter. If you'd rather watch the full conversation, it's right here: Guusto Webinar | Recognition That Reaches Everyone
It helps to start with scale, because the frontline is far bigger than most engagement strategies quietly assume. We say it a lot, but it's a stat worth repeating - frontline workers make up roughly 77% to 80% of the global workforce, close to 2.7 billion of the world's 3.5 billion employees. Yet, with that in mind, most workforce technology is designed exclusively for the people sitting at desks. Josh Bersin, founder and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, named that imbalance directly in UKG's recent frontline report:
"Despite making up the vast majority of the workforce, most solution providers in the HR and workforce management space are not designing solutions specifically to help the frontline worker."
— Josh Bersin, founder and CEO, The Josh Bersin Company (in UKG's frontline workforce report)
The people living inside that gap feel it every day. In UKG's second-annual study of more than 8,200 frontline employees across 10 countries, 47% said their organization runs two separate cultures, one for office staff and one for everyone on the front line, and just over half at 51% said they're not satisfied with their employee experience. Recognition is usually one of the first things to slip through that divide, and UKG's own data shows how expensive that slip can get, because a lack of recognition or rewards ranks among the top five reasons frontline employees say they'd quit their job.
Top 5
A lack of recognition or rewards ranks among the top five reasons frontline employees say they'd quit their job, in both 2024 and 2025. (UKG, More Perspectives from the Frontline Workforce)
The business case for closing that gap is a lot harder-edged than people expect. Gallup finds that only one in three U.S. workers strongly agree they received recognition or praise for good work in the past seven days, and that employees who don't feel adequately recognized are twice as likely to say they'll leave within the year.
Turnover at that scale lands straight on the P&L, since Gallup estimates voluntary turnover costs U.S. businesses around a trillion dollars a year and puts the cost of replacing a single employee at one-half to two times their annual salary. Recognition is one of the cheapest levers you have against that number, as long as it actually reaches people.
There's an uncomfortable question hiding in all of this, and it's worth saying out loud. If your recognition program only works for employees who have a company inbox, then a large part of your frontline is watching head office receive something they never will. Getting recognition to those people, on time and in the flow of their day, was the bar we set for everything in this release.
The friction that stops recognition is almost always mechanical. On a busy floor, a manager passes a dozen moments worth celebrating in a single shift, and every one of them competes with the next customer, the next task, and the next small fire to put out, so anything that pulls a manager out of their workflow tends to lose. Our integration work is about removing those steps so that sending recognition feels like part of the shift rather than a detour from it.
Cameron walked through what's live today and what's coming next.
The full Guusto experience now lives inside Microsoft Teams and Outlook, so a manager can send a reward and a recipient can redeem one without leaving the tools they keep open all day.
Recognition activity mirrors into the UKG Talk feed, which is built for frontline communication, so teams can see and celebrate each other in the same place they trade shift updates.
The Axonify integration does two useful things at once, it can trigger a reward when someone finishes an incentivized training or hits a learning milestone, and it can then push that recognition back into Axonify.
A Slack integration is on the way.
"Our goal with a lot of our integrations has been to fit ourselves into the ways that our customers are already working."
— Cameron Waind, Recognition That Reaches Everyone webinar
When Kwesi was asked what actually changes once recognition lives inside those tools, his answer came down to two words that every people leader cares about:
Kwesi also pointed to a second effect that's easy to overlook. Routing recognition through a tool like Axonify or UKG Talk does more than deliver the reward, because it also pulls employees back into the platform you're already asking them to use, which quietly lifts adoption of both at the same time.
One integration is worth its own spotlight, because it sits right at the center of this whole conversation. UKG Talk is UKG's communication hub, built into the UKG mobile app and designed specifically for frontline teams, and it's where many frontline employees clock in, check their pay, and talk to one another. That makes it a natural home for recognition, and Guusto's recognition activity flows straight into the UKG Talk feed so celebrating a teammate happens in the flow of work.
On a recent episode of the HR on the Frontline podcast, Kendall Carroll, Director of Product Management at UKG, shared that the two teams are actively building toward exactly this:
"We're working right now with the Guusto team to do a proof of concept for a few key customers, and we're aiming to get something out in the next few months and put it in the hands of users."
— Kendall Carroll, Director of Product Management at UKG, HR on the Frontline podcast
Kendall's take on reaching frontline teams inside the tools they already use is what landed hardest with our audience.
The takeaway carries across every integration in this section, whether that's UKG Talk, Teams, Axonify, or Slack: recognition works best when your people don't have to go anywhere new to receive it.
How to put this to work
Map the two or three tools your frontline actually touches every shift, whether that's Teams, UKG Talk, Axonify, or your scheduling app, and turn recognition on inside the one with the highest daily usage first.
You'll get far more recognition sent per manager from a single well-placed integration than from any amount of reminding people to visit a separate site.
It's easy to picture the person receiving recognition on a phone, and just as easy to forget that the person sending it is often moving all day too, whether that's a retail lead, a charge nurse, or a shift supervisor who's rarely anywhere near a desk. The rebuilt Guusto mobile app was designed for both sides of that exchange.
Cameron showed the updates in action. Navigation now surfaces the people most relevant to you based on your org chart, the home screen prompts you toward recognition-worthy moments like onboarding, milestones, and birthdays pulled automatically from your HCM or payroll system, a leaderboard highlights your most active recognizers, and sending has been streamlined so you can pick recipients and get a reward out in seconds. There's even an AI writing assist that helps a manager get a thoughtful message started when they only have a minute between tasks, while still leaving the actual reason and the personal touch to the human sending it.
Kwesi's answer to what a frictionless mobile experience really changes was the most memorable moment in this section, because it was a true story about redemption happening out in the world:
That story lines up almost word for word with something Kendall Carroll shared on the podcast, speaking from the product side about why engagement only sticks when there's nothing extra to open:
"If it's not on that same surface, it won't stick. If something feels like extra work, it's going to get dropped immediately. The time to complete has to be in seconds, not minutes."
— Kendall Carroll, Director of Product Management at UKG, HR on the Frontline podcast
How to put this to work
Map the two or three tools your frontline actually touches every shift, whether that's Teams, UKG Talk, Axonify, or your scheduling app, and turn recognition on inside the one with the highest daily usage first.
You'll get far more recognition sent per manager from a single well-placed integration than from any amount of reminding people to visit a separate site.
Our podcast, HR on the Frontline, brings HR and people leaders together to talk honestly about culture, recognition, and operations on the frontline, including the full conversation with UKG's Kendall Carroll on operationalizing engagement.
No fluff, just actionable insights that you can start using in your day to day.
Give it a listen and follow along for new episodes.
This is the part of the product that's hardest to copy, and for many of our customers it's the entire reason they chose Guusto. Most recognition platforms rest on one quiet assumption, that every employee has a company email address to receive a notification or claim a login, and on the frontline that assumption breaks constantly, with some workforces having no corporate email for ninety percent of their people.
"Many programs are designed with the assumption that there's a company email to target notifications or grant access, and a lot of programs kind of fall apart at that point. That's where we've specialized, because we're able to reach people regardless of their contact details."
— Cameron Waind, Recognition That Reaches Everyone webinar
Guusto's answer is a full ladder of delivery options that meet people wherever they actually are. When there's a mobile number on file, a reward can go straight to the employee by text. When there isn't, a reward can be printed, or turned into a shareable link that a manager drops into a Teams chat. And a reward can be routed to a manager to hand off in person, either as a printout or as a QR code the employee scans in a break room, with the whole thing still tracked and tied back to the recipient for reporting and taxes.
Kwesi's story about his years at BlackBerry made the value of that flexibility feel concrete:
When Kwesi was asked which single gap comes up most often in his conversations with HR leaders, he didn't hesitate, and the answer was delivery. Frontline companies at scale, from national pharmacies to casinos to hospices with nurses spread across several states, often have no reliable channel to their own people, and the question he hears over and over is some version of "can I actually get this to the people I have the hardest time reaching?" A close second is how to get busy managers who are also walking the floor to send recognition in the first place. Offline delivery is built to answer both of those at once.
How to put this to work
Pull a quick and honest audit of what contact details you have for your frontline today: company email, personal mobile, or nothing at all. That one list tells you how much of your workforce your current program can even reach, and it usually makes the case for offline delivery faster than any pitch could.
If you take one practical thing from the webinar, let it be Kendall's advice on how to begin, because it holds up whether you're launching a brand new program or reviving one that's gone quiet. The instinct is usually to recognize everything at once, and that's exactly what causes most employee recognition programs to stall. A better starting point is to pick a single high-frequency behavior that matters to your business and build one clear trigger around it.
This is also where good employee recognition ideas start to multiply on their own, because once your team sees the behavior that gets celebrated, they begin looking for it in each other. That momentum is what turns a program from a policy into a habit.
The most honest read on whether Guusto's right for you comes from a real conversation about your program and where you want to take it.
Book a call with our team, which includes recognition specialists like Kwesi Thomas, who spent 25 years building total rewards and recognition programs at companies like BlackBerry, Nortel, and Shopify. You'll get straight, candid answers and insights about fit for where you are and where you're headed with employee recognition.
Expect an honest look at your goals with zero pressure: Book a demo now!
Employee recognition software gives managers and peers a simple way to send meaningful, often reward-backed recognition, and gives employees an easy way to redeem it. The most effective platforms work inside the tools people already use, such as Teams, Slack, or UKG Talk, and on mobile, so recognition lands close to the moment it was earned.
The link is well established. Gallup finds that employees who don't feel adequately recognized are twice as likely to say they'll quit within the year, and that managers alone account for around 70% of the variance in team engagement, which makes giving managers fast, easy recognition tools one of the highest-leverage moves available to a people team. Gallup's rule of thumb is that recognition should land roughly every seven days to keep engagement high.
You need a platform built for it. Guusto can deliver rewards by text message, printed voucher, a shareable link, or a QR code a manager hands off in person, with no corporate email or employee login required, and every reward stays tracked back to the recipient.
Start narrow and prove it. Pick one frequent behavior that matters, build a clear trigger around it, put it where work already happens, attach a measurable outcome, and expand only once you can show it worked. Trying to recognize everything at once is the most common reason these programs quietly stall.
— Skai Dalziel, Co-Founder & CEO @ Guusto