Recognition is more than a thank you. It is the foundation of a thriving workplace, driving motivation, engagement, and performance.
In this episode of Rewarding Conversations, we explore how Ultimate, Loylogic’s Points as a Service (PaaS) platform, is combining a science-backed employee recognition framework with seamless technology to help businesses make appreciation effortless, structured and truly meaningful.
Gabi Kool, Chief Executive of Loylogic, and celebrated thought leader and renowned workplace culture expert Tamra Chandler reveal how an exclusive 100 Moments That Matter framework provides a science-backed way to transform how organizations recognize and reward their people. They discuss why traditional recognition programs often fall short, how companies can move beyond transactional rewards, and what it takes to build a culture where appreciation becomes a habit.
If you are an HR leader, a business executive, or someone passionate about workplace culture, this conversation will give you fresh perspectives and practical strategies for redefining employee motivation.
Listen now to discover how recognition can drive engagement, retention, and high performance without the usual complexities of managing multiple reward platforms and vendors.
Tamra will share more insights on the partnership at the HR World Summit in Lisbon this May, where she will present the framework alongside Loylogic leadership. We have a limited number of exclusive tickets available. Register your interest now and be part of the conversation shaping the future of workplace recognition.
Companies looking to transform their approach to employee engagement and create a truly strategic rewards program can learn more by visiting Ultimate.one and booking a demo today.
Podcast Transcript:
01:56: What's the background to this partnership?
Gabi Kool: "Yes, happy to kick this one off. Basically, I had the pleasure of meeting Tamra. I think it was last year in Switzerland. We were both at an HR conference at the time, and I really, really enjoyed listening to her while she was speaking on stage about many things related to employee motivation, how to build high performing workplaces.
"While I was listening to that, I thought, what a perfect fit that would be for what we were at that stage, in the early stage of building with our Ultimate solution. So, I thought I would see if I could tempt her to be our global brand ambassador for Ultimate, and also to bring her thought leadership as a way of solidifying the science in our platform. So, I tried my luck, introduced myself and explained what Ultimate was about. And so that was how kind of our first interactions started. And here we are."
Tamra Chandler: "I would say it wasn't that hard of a sell, Gabi, because, you know, my passion is about creating workplace environments where people just really thrive and can show up and be themselves. That means having a workplace where gratitude and recognition are just how we do things around here. And, you know, anytime we can provide tools or assets that make that easier, it just fuels that kind of environment. Ultimate, to me, was like a no brainer. It just, it removes so many of the barriers, and it creates that platform to deliver a healthy and inclusive and warm environment."
03:43: That's the perfect segue into the first question for you, Tamra, focusing in on your specialist area. Why do you think organizations often struggle with creating meaningful employee recognition?
Tamra: "Yeah, that's probably one of the bigger questions, right? And I think we have to kind of step back and say, well, what are we trying to do? And we're trying to create a new habit. Recognition needs to become a habit, and that habit needs to start with the individuals that make up the organization. They need to start to adopt a way of shifting the organization culture, to accept this is, again, the way we do things around here.
"I often like to think about it as mindset, methods and muscle. And we always say you have to start with mindset. You have to sort of check in with, do we have a belief that recognition is a good thing? Do we understand the value and the impact that a culture that swims in gratitude and appreciation provides? Do we even understand some of the fundamentals, like when we talk about frequent recognition? I mean, that's an important question, because when you look at the science behind it, you'll see that there's this interesting gap. It's a paradox of some sorts between how frequently we want to be appreciated or recognized and how frequently we engage in offering recognition and appreciation. There's a Delta there. With mindsets, we have to start by aligning on why this is important, and what it would look like, and why it's important for us to have it in the culture.
"Once we've shifted our mindset to wrap around that concept, then we can start to think about methods and muscle and, you know, Ultimate provides us with this fabulous method. It gives us this platform to start to ease into that habit, to make it easy, to start to create this recognition culture, and then we go from there.
"Now, when we talk about muscle, if you ever look at any of my content, you'll see I always talk about leaders go first. And I think what's so important here is that once we've shifted the mindset, we've created the methods we need leaders to lead the way. We need them to start to engage in a way that says this is how we work here. This is how we operate, and this is the way that we recognize and celebrate the work that everyone brings each and every day."
06:12: And is that the inspiration behind the 100 moments that matter framework?
Tamra: "Yeah, I think when we started talking about the 100 moments, what I really wanted to do is bring to the table information, you know, the helpful information that provides the platform for high performing teams and inspired people. So how do you do that? I really leaned into what I know through the science. What do I know through my 30 plus years working with organizations to create inspired organizations to inspire people? But the aim was not just to provide this pick list for people, which is somewhat what it is, but to help us think beyond the common ideas, to help us really kind of broaden the topics that we might, you know, recognize or notice that are being offered within the organization that we see people doing every day.
"I think we fall into old habits of recognizing the same. Oh, you did a great customer presentation, or you did this, but there's so much more goodness that happens in an organization, and I think we need to broaden our horizons. So, the 100 moments was about how do we do that? How do we help people think more broadly about all the good things they're seeing and witnessing when they show up for work every day, or they dial into work every day, or, you know, however they're engaging?"
07:33: That, again, leads on to an obvious next question, which is how does this framework align with modern workforce trends such as the demand for more personalized and meaningful recognition, and also, how does it tie into the kind of modern ways of working, hybrid work and remote working, etc?
Tamra: "What's interesting about that question is sort of asking yourself, what has changed? Humans haven't changed, but their expectations have changed when they're engaging in a workplace.
"What I mean by that is, if you look at human motivation, we have craved being part of something, this idea of wanting to be included in a tribe, of being appreciated by our tribe that's as old as the human race. But for years in the business world, we really tried to separate the human side of the workplace from the more business side of the workplace. We tried to draw a line, if you will, between the head and the heart. So, I think what has changed again is that, thankfully, we're more enlightened. Now most of us have a greater understanding that separating the head and the heart is a fallacy. We can't really separate it, and that if we fail to really see to the human side of people, we diminish them, we put them in a sub-optimal state. They might be operating from a place of fear or just indifference, right?
"When you look at some of the engagement scores, with our more enlightened state, as we're leading organizations and people, we need to understand the importance of helping people know that we see them. That we see the value that they're bringing, that we are attending to their heart and their head. And that begs us to start to create these environments where we can celebrate and recognize people that we can lean into practices that say thank you and recognize them for the contributions. And when we do that, amazing things happen. We put people in that optimal state where they're showing up as their whole self, where they're energized and excited about the work. And those types of things create this whole energy and performance, and amazing things really happen.
"Back to your original question, Austin, but the 100 moments provides us this framework. It gives us these science backed prompts that help us to be better at noticing that goodness and seeing to the whole person, and making them feel included, that you’re important, you're part of the tribe. That is some powerful stuff."
10:06: Indeed, extremely powerful. I think everybody would agree with that. So, Gabi, bringing you in here, and given everything Tamra has mentioned there, how does Ultimate address the common challenges companies face, and how do you kind of go about creating an effective global recognition program?
Gabi: "When we were looking around to develop Ultimate and we were talking to HR leaders and kind of building our own hypothesis of what was kind of mostly needed in that space, one of the observations that we had at the time, Austin, was that you will find great, great HR leaders out there, of course, in many, many kinds of companies, and also great leaders in organizations who want to do the right thing. But if you looked at what the HR departments often had to do when it came to incentive programs, especially multinational organizations, it was very often that a lot of the energy that they had to spend on it was more going to the operational part, finding the right kind of tech partnering country, A, B, C, D, E, the right kind of incentive partner in the in these kind of countries as well. The space where the HR leaders that we spoke to really wanted to spend their time was building that kind of right designs and programs where, to Tamra's point about the head and the heart, they were rewarding the micro moments.
"When we set out to develop Ultimate, we wanted to take care of that by building a platform that takes, especially for multinational organizations, that operational burden away, so that we can enable, via our platform, the right kind of design elements for the right program for your organization, as an HR leader.
"We've made a lot of really great progress so that it's now very simple for an HR leader to just buy the relevant number of motivational currencies via the platform to then distribute it in the manner that best suits, without having to worry about the operational elements."
12:27: So, Tamra, coming back to the 100 moments that matter, could you share a few examples for us, please?
Tamra: "We've designed the 100 moments to really think about what are these different sort of practices that we could have, or sort of themes. You're going to see things that are typical, like, you know, nice job is one of our themes. A moment under that is achieving a notable impact of performance. That's pretty common, but we tried to go well beyond that. So, another of our categories is called the Best of Us. And one of my favorites there is operating without judgment or blame. And I know in my best days, I do that, but you know, we don't always achieve that every day.
"Resilience, owning it, really thriving an environment of uncertainty, is another one I really like, right, called I'll be There. And one of the moments is generously giving your time to support others. You know those colleagues who lean in when you need that help and wanting to say thank you and recognize that we have inclusion as one of our categories. And one of my favorites in that is creating opportunities for others to shine.
"Our category of Authentically Human has some good ones, like displaying enthusiasm, passion and joy at work and just saying, thank you to those people that bring that energy. So those are just a few, Austin."
14:01: So how do moments like these help organizations kind of go beyond that transactional rewards culture toward kind of building a culture that that's full of engagement and loyalty?
Tamra: "Gabi spoke to this, as far as the micro moments go, is this idea of the personalization. We're really looking to make it easy to recognize those moments, to take a light pause, to say, I see you. I see this value you bring. This isn't a transaction. It's a personal reflection. There's a reason we call them moments, or even micro moments, right? Because that's what it is. It's a simple moment to pause, to do a little noticing, and to say, thank you."
14:51: That sums it up beautifully. And is it true that HR leaders have, often, not in all cases, but often have struggled to get buy in from leadership when it comes to investing in recognition? And does this new framework, this science backed framework, help in changing the discussion around the investment?
Tamra: "Well, I certainly hope it does. Sadly, sometimes it's hard to get support for this, even though, you know, there's a very strong business case. If you look at the science behind recognition, you look at the benefits it brings, when people are frequently recognized, when they feel connected, they're engaged, and when you're engaged, you perform better. So, there's a lot of moments in here that are team-based because when our teams are engaged, and we're really kind of moving as a high performing team, that's when we really drive performance for an organization.
"So, there's a lot here from a business case, but sometimes you don't get leaders who really connect with those numbers, or necessarily believe those numbers, and that can make it difficult. But I think there's a couple of things happening here. I think Ultimate lowers some of the barriers, as Gabi's talked about, to ease into this. So that improves your business case, because it takes away some of the things that have made it hard in the past. And then, we're creating these moments that make it easy and light and not adding extra burden to managers or others. So, there's a lot of goodness that's happening here.
"My one little tip for leaders is, if you're having trouble with a with a business leader, sometimes what can be most powerful is to sit and talk with business leaders about their own history, and get them talking about the times that they were recognized and the impact that had on, their own experiences, or the impact that might have even had on their career. And I think if we if, sometimes, if the if the business case strategy doesn't work. Sometimes the heart strategy works and gets them really thinking about how this is important in creating those same types of experiences for the people in their own organization. It can be difficult, but I think you can come at it from both those ways, and Ultimate makes the business case easier, and we make it lighter for your managers, and we can really impact, you know, the experience for your people, for sure."
17:28: So, what you're saying there is that there's a very human, centered approach in your framework?
Tamra: "Yes, that is such a simple way to say it!"
17:42: Gabi, coming to you, how does Ultimate take that human centered approach and combine it with technology to create a platform that is truly transformational?
Gabi: It's an interesting one, right? We've now got these beautiful 100 moments built into a framework, and then the other part that you need to do in a platform like Ultimate is make it very easy for the HR director to bring this alive in an organization and administrate. But also, as we know, there's an enormous power in the whole peer-to-peer recognition area of these kind of incentives, especially if I can give, as an employee very easily, some Stars as a form of recognition for somebody in my team or my organization who has done something good for the company or good for me or basically helped me out.
"Now, how do you enable that part? It's not so easy if you've got a team of 5,000 employees to educate everybody about the 100 moments and exactly which moments to use, and when. So, where technology then comes into play, and that's what we're working out and rolling out as we speak, is, how can you then bring an AI component, for example, where somebody can describe what somebody did for them, and then in the back end of our platform, it automatically marries that to the right moment from the framework. So, when an HR director looks at kind of how the organization is recognizing and rewarding each other for the moment in there, are there certain blind spots, let's say, in the organization of behaviors that you would like to stimulate but that are never somehow either acknowledged or maybe displayed, can also be the case.
"So, we see a role for AI in there to make that rewarding mechanism easy for employees. We've also seen it in our own organization. Before we had built Ultimate, we had our own 'thank yous', where people could, on our internal platform, thank each other for certain activities. Everybody had their own mini budget of points that they could give away to their colleagues on a monthly basis. And we've seen, therefore, the power of that part now, where the technology comes into play, that's kind of, I think, where we make that as frictionless, and as easy as possible, so that there's no complicated steps in the way of enabling that.
"The other part, of course, is embedding this in the existing HRMS platforms that organizations are using. The more we can embed Ultimate in all the leading HRMS platforms, of course, that also makes it much easier for organizations to adopt it?"
20:43: I want to pick up on something you've mentioned there, which is around the whole rewards and incentive side of things. So how does Loylogic's expertise developed over more than two decades of creating rewards and incentive solutions position Ultimate to serve companies of all industries and sizes globally?
Gabi: "Yes, it's an interesting question, because our history lies very firmly in the consumer loyalty space. So we've been around for two decades, as you mentioned, supporting the largest either frequent flyer programs in the travel industry, largest bank loyalty programs with some of the most notable brands in the world there, as well as fast moving consumer goods or the CPG kind of brands with their loyalty initiatives, but it was always basically consumer loyalty, where our main job as a company was to support our clients, so these program owners could look after their best customers. So, when these companies want to reward their best customers, it was our job to get the right incentive at the right time, in the right kind of user experience, in the hands of their most precious asset, their customers, so that it positively influences the behavior of those customers via very memorable experience, and make these customers feel warm in their heart.
"Now, if you translate that to the employee motivation space, where we are newly entering with our solution of Ultimate, we're not dealing with an organization's best customers, but arguably with their other most important asset, their employees, their human capital. So also here, there's a very strong parallel with giving the right incentives to the people at the right time in a way that's fun, and how they can also recognize and incentivize their colleagues, so that it cements that relationship between the organization and the employee. So, while there's a slightly different angle to it, there's a lot of learnings that we take from our two decades of working on the business to consumer loyalty side into this B to E, employee motivational side.
"If you then combine it with, of course, the fact we have global technology, we have global content available for these kinds of programs that we support, we really thought, how can we then enable that to be a force to reckon with, to help these organizations around the world?"
23:21 Bringing everything together, what do you hope to achieve with Ultimate? What vision do you have regarding Ultimate's role in shaping the global motivation rewards industry?
Gabi: "Well, we're ambitious people Austin, so we've got high hopes! Basically, we would love to be THE global rewards currency in the employee or motivational space. And basically, that means that when these employees get recognized by their peers or by their managers or by the organization, they get something that they really love, rather than a well-meant incentive that might not be spot on for an employee. We think that giving them these Ultimate stars and then having a global reward shop with different kind of content for every market in that platform, and it doesn't matter if it's merchandise or gift cards or travel or experiences or like, with like the sky is the limit in there, is exciting. So, we that's what we are hoping for, dreaming of, and basically working really hard for to make our steps in that journey."
24:26: Tamra, similar question to you. What excites you most about the potential of the 100 moments that matter to transform workplace cultures and motivation?
Tamra: "I started off talking about my passion for creating those kinds of workplaces. And what I'm so hoping is that the 100 moments help people realize how often they see these good things happening around them. You know, in my feedback book, we talk about the fine art of noticing, and it is an art we're not very good at it. And. So I'm hoping that the people read these 100 moments and they're like, wow, you know, I never thought about that goodness. I see that happening over here or over there, but I'm going to start recognizing it now, right? I hope it inspires them to think about what really matters and how they can be part of an environment where people feel included, seen, appreciated, that it becomes this powerful way of celebrating so much that happens that we just sort of let go by us. But instead of letting it go by, we start noticing it and taking that moment to recognize it."
25:38: Indeed, it's a fascinating, kind of almost melting pot, isn't it, of art science, AI technology, the human centered approach, that that could be really impactful and have that enduring impact on employee engagement, I guess so. My final question to both of you is, what message would you like to leave for companies and HR teams seeking to elevate their approach to employee motivation and recognition?
Tamra: "I'm really wanting to help organizations build a true culture of recognition. And you know what I mean by that is that is the way we work. You know that's what culture means. This is how we do things around here. And what I think is so powerful about what we're bringing to the market, between the platform and the framework and the 100 moments, is we're making it easy to create that foundation for that recognition culture.
"To me, recognition culture goes beyond the Ultimate 100 moments. It goes into the shout outs in a meeting, the pauses during a day to verbally recognize somebody. But I think what's so important about it is it truly becomes that platform that can fuel that culture, where we learn those new habits, where we start to create that energy that just sort of builds over time. And the Ultimate platform that's easy to implement, that's easy to deploy, that gets us thinking more broadly, brings that to the market. It's a powerful place to start."
27:18 And Gabi?
Gabi: "We all spend so much time at our workplace, right? So, my big hope for this whole joint initiative is that HR leaders are truly inspired by these moments.
"When we looked at the list of 100 moments, and we'd like to think that we are, of course, recognizing our team well, and that we are actively doing all the right stuff, day in, day out, I can tell you, when we looked at the list, there were at least 60 moments where I thought, yes, that's a great thing, I should recognize it more. I should be more mindful of paying attention to that and recognizing our team. The same feeling was felt in our own leadership team. I think you can take a lot of inspiration from that platform.
"I would really encourage all the listeners to this podcast go and explore the platform that we've put together with Ultimate and look at all these moments and reflect on them. And then, of course, we would love to hear the feedback from HR leaders around the globe while we're on this journey to further build out this platform. They are part of that journey with us. In the end, if we can help a lot of HR leaders in their own journeys it would be great. That's my hope and the ambition and what I believe we can achieve."
