Grand & Toy’s Helen Ashton explains why they used a benefits platform to drive an effective employee recognition program
Employee recognition programs are everywhere. But while most companies have one, few get them right the first time.
Helen Ashton, vice president of people, culture and customer experience at Grand & Toy, has spent a long time thinking about what separates a recognition program that drives real outcomes from one that that’s just a “nice-to-have.”
"Recognition means different things for different people, and we can't lose sight of that," Ashton said. "For some people, financial recognition is what's important. For other people, it's just recognition from their peers and visibility to the work that they're doing. For other people, it means respect. A recognition program alone is not what's going to keep people. I think it's a combination of factors that will get you there."
She defines recognition as a core part of culture that has to be grounded in organizational values and linked directly to business outcomes, not treated as a bolt-on perk. She also argues that recognition is inherently personal as some employees care most about financial rewards, while others care about being seen and acknowledged by peers, and others about basic respect.
But Grand & Toy’s older employee recognition model didn’t reflect that complexity, Ashton noted, because it sat in private manager–employee exchanges, which sidelined the many employees who care more about internal acknowledgement than about cash. It was also poorly designed for a large cohort of older hourly workers who had limited access to technology and home printers and who also found digital gift cards confusing and stressful to redeem.
And even though Grand & Toy considered prescriptive perks like Amazon Prime memberships for the younger demographic, the organization ultimately decided against them as Ashton believes the moment an employer chooses a perk, they run the risk of the recognition losing its meaning for anyone the perk doesn't fit.
As a result, the company implemented Gusto, an HR payroll and benefits platform. That move opened up peer-to-peer recognition, made praise visible across the business, and integrated it into Microsoft Teams so employees could see birthdays, anniversaries and shout-outs in a live feed.
Now, recognition activity is now explicitly connected to company values and strategic pillars, and financial rewards are managed through the same system, with simple barcode-based redemption that removes the previous friction for hourly staff, explained Ashton.
Even more crucially, the platform offers a huge range of redemption options and lets employees bank rewards over time, so they can put them toward what actually matters to them. Everything from family Christmas gifts to larger personal purchases they would struggle to justify out of the household budget.
"It solved a lot of issues, and it created a lot of buzz in the organization," she said. “Because the platform enables you, the variety of the recognition has been fantastic.”
According to Ashton, every people leader has a monthly budget they can deploy at their discretion, while senior leadership holds a separate pool for larger recognitions when smaller amounts don't match the scale of the contribution.
Meanwhile, year-end awards, tied to both culture and business results, run through the same platform. Milestones and anniversaries do too, with associates free to spend their rewards however they see fit.
Ashton notes the guiding principle behind both the recognition program and the company's volunteering and community affairs initiatives has been the same: to create as many meaningful choices as possible.
“If the program is not meaningful to your associates, it's not getting you what it is that you need to get out of the program,” she noted.
Grand & Toy also tracks engagement with the program itself monthly – who is participating, who isn't, and why. Online activity serves as a barometer where they can measure comment volume, response rates, and general interaction which signals whether the program still has energy behind it.
While Ashton doesn't claim the approach is cutting-edge, she sees it as a more honest measure than trying to tie recognition directly to talent management outcomes it can't deliver alone.
Ashton believes fairness in a recognition program starts with gathering real data rather than guessing what employees want. That means using every channel available, like surveys, focus groups, HR feedback, exit and onboarding data to build a clear picture of what associates actually need, and then designing the program around those findings.
From there, ongoing monitoring of engagement levels is essential to confirm the program is working. She also underscored the importance of regular pulse checks, though not on any rigid schedule, to verify the program is still solving the problems it was built to address.
"I wouldn't say it's a quarterly thing. I wouldn't say it's even a yearly thing sometimes. But you do need to have some metric where you triple check in to make sure that this program is still delivering the results and solving the real problems that you have. If you build in the program where a certain group of associates [is] automatically excluded because they will never work on the project that's big enough, then they will never have the visibility because of their job and as a result, your recognition program is not going to drive any talent or business outcomes at all," she said.
