Transform 2026: Employee Engagement
At Transform 2026, HR leaders from Ernst Young, Mazda, IBM, and Alight Solutions all found the same thing. The best recognition programs cut friction to nearly zero. They value peer recognition over manager recognition. They use AI to remove admin work so the human moment stays human.
Practitioners at Transform 2026 covered 86 sessions. Those sessions drew on real data from hundreds of organizations. Speakers were not pushing the usual fixes like more surveys, better perks, or stronger purpose statements. They were sharing what is actually working. The picture that came out is clearer than engagement talks have been in years.
The organizations making progress share one instinct. They stopped building programs around what leadership wants to say and started building around what makes it easy for employees to recognize each other.
Tara Staben leads Benefits, Wellbeing, and Recognition at Ernst Young. She presented EY's research on why some recognition programs get used and others don't. The key factor is simple: how many steps it takes to say thank you.
"Eliminate barriers to recognition. We have so much administrative burden, and our managers and our leaders are so busy, that if there are approval layers and hoops to jump through in order to deliver a simple recognition, they just won't do it."
Tara Staben, Global Leader for Benefits, Wellbeing, and Recognition, Ernst Young — Human-Centric Design in an AI World
Recognition gaps are a design problem. They are not a culture problem. EY scaled recognition across a global workforce. They found that when you cut approval steps and forms down to almost nothing, behavior changes on its own. Managers who were not recognizing people were not checked out. They were just buried in work. Give them a 15-second path and recognition volume goes up.
Staben's second finding shifts where smart organizations focus their design work. When recognition does happen, who gives it matters more than their rank.
"The recognition was more meaningful when it came from somebody you worked with every day who knew what you did all day than from a senior leader who was so far removed that they didn't know you at all."
Tara Staben, Ernst Young — Human-Centric Design in an AI World
Most organizations have spent years improving senior recognition. Think all-hands shoutouts, CEO posts, and quarterly awards dinners. The data says peer recognition hits harder. The best return on engagement investment is not a new platform or a bigger budget. It is making it easier for coworkers to acknowledge each other, often and with specifics.
The session "Building a Culture of Performance: Insights from 1,800+ Organizations" had a key finding. It should change how HR budgets get set. Organizations with the best outcomes are not just high on engagement or high on performance. They have cracked both. They treat them as one system.
Companies that score high on both engagement and performance confidence show better results. Performance confidence means employees believe the organization rewards and develops top performers. These companies show higher stock price growth, lower attrition, and stronger business results over time. High engagement plus strong performance accountability produces outcomes that neither one achieves alone.
The Culture Connection Flywheel: From "Human-Centric Design in an AI World": the research showed a "Culture Connection Flywheel." It shows how recognition, learning, wellbeing, and performance build on each other when linked into one system. Each positive signal makes the next one stronger. Organizations building this integrated system now are opening a gap that will be hard for others to close.
Mark Shea leads Dealer Employee Engagement at Mazda. He named the goal clearly:
"We know what we're looking for as a thriving Mazda ambassador. We know the culture we want. We know the performance that we want. So we got to clearly define that... But here's the thing. We understand theoretically what we're trying to do, but we're still struggling to figure out how to get there."
Mark Shea, Dealer Employee Engagement Lead, Mazda — Human-Centric Design in an AI World
Organizations that have named the destination clearly are best positioned to close the gap. They know what a thriving ambassador looks like. They have defined the culture and the performance standard. The struggle Shea describes is nearly universal right now. Naming the problem is the first step toward solving it. Mazda is further along than most.
Organizations reporting the strongest results have found a clear division of labor. AI handles friction. Humans handle the moments that matter.
Donna Dorsey is CHRO at Alight Solutions. Madison Gooch is a Partner at IBM. They described their joint work in "Driving HR Excellence in an AI-Centered World." Together they built AI orchestration layers for HR. AI takes on information retrieval and routing. That work used to consume HR bandwidth. Freeing up that time lets people focus on conversations that need real judgment.
"When we have these tools able to assist our customer care agents, they're spending time really trying to understand the folks that they're talking to. They're not worried about where they're going to get the answer to the question or what tool or what system they have to go to to get that answer or what document they have to read. They can really engage."
Donna Dorsey, CHRO, Alight Solutions — Driving HR Excellence in an AI-Centered World
Human connection improves when admin work drops. This applies directly to recognition. AI can surface the signal: "this employee has not been recognized in 90 days" or "this team is trending toward burnout risk." But the recognition itself stays entirely human. The words and the specifics are written by a person.
EY's position on that boundary is clear:
"We're holding pretty firm that we're not going to allow AI to write the recognition messages and really insist on those remaining personal. Because while the technology is important, if we lose the personalization, we'll undermine the impact of what we're trying to do with recognition."
Tara Staben, Ernst Young — Human-Centric Design in an AI World
AI creates the conditions for recognition to happen more often. Humans supply the authenticity that makes it land. Gooch described what this looks like at the HR business partner level.
"All of a sudden, he became a very transactional interface for me, as opposed to now... our relationship is materially different today. We spend a lot more time on culture. We spend a lot more time on organizational capacity. We spend a lot more time talking about how org design decisions impact our productivity."
Madison Gooch, Partner, IBM — Driving HR Excellence in an AI-Centered World
The organizations moving fastest have drawn the human-AI boundary clearly and held it.
The session "Making Customer-First a Cultural Operating System" challenged where HR sits in the value chain:
"We have the ability to shape how we hire. We have the ability to shape total rewards. We shape who gets promoted, making sure there's no biases in our promotion process. And all of that truly leads to your operating system, which fuels your business outcome. So stop calling each other a support function. We are truly the foundation of every company."
Speaker, Culture + Belonging Track — Making Customer-First a Cultural Operating System
Engagement follows when employees can see a clear line between their daily work and outcomes for customers or the people they serve. Organizations that build that line on purpose are seeing it pay off.
A VC panel featured Beth Carlson from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Alison Baumgates from SemperVirens. They pointed to where investment is heading. The focus is on tools that deliver insight inside the actual flow of work. These tools close the gap between knowing something is wrong and being able to fix it. The bet is on continuous, action-focused feedback loops, not better annual surveys.
"I think it's actually people who are doing work that often think of the ways to best reimagine their own work. And so to the degree you are managers of people who do that, I'd listen to them."
Beth Carlson, Chief HR Officer, Lightspeed Venture Partners — The Next Big Bet: VCs on Emerging Workforce Technologies
The best engagement intelligence in most organizations already exists. It lives with the people doing the work. The programs gaining ground have found structured ways to surface it. They act on it fast enough to matter.
"The Loneliness Epidemic: What Your Culture Is Really Creating" scored 95 out of 100 for relevance. It tackled what may be the most underestimated engagement lever of the hybrid era. Flexible work has delivered real value. It has also cost many employees the small, daily moments of connection that used to happen without any planning. Organizations ahead of this problem are now designing those moments on purpose.
Belonging is built through real human acts. Vulnerability, shared effort, and genuine acknowledgment all play a role. Technology does not create belonging. But it can prompt the conditions that let humans build it. Organizations that understand this engineer connection into the work itself. They do not bolt on a separate wellbeing program.
"Designing Work for Energy, Trust, and Performance" made the point sharper. The distributed workplace has produced what the session called a "de-energized state." That is a design problem, not a people problem. Organizations that design hybrid work with the same care they bring to customer experience are seeing measurably better engagement outcomes.
The Integration Opportunity: Multiple sessions landed on the same structural point. HR programs for recognition, learning, wellbeing, and performance are usually designed and budgeted in silos. Organizations that connect these into one employee experience see compounding returns. When a recognition moment surfaces a development opportunity, or a wellbeing check-in connects to performance coaching, the total effect on engagement is far larger than any single program delivers on its own.
The session on social impact measurement raised a question. The best engagement teams now ask it of their own programs: "Why are you measuring? What problem are you trying to fix? And how is this measurement going to help you solve that problem?"
Organizations with the strongest momentum have stopped treating measurement as the finish line. The annual survey that generates a deck and a town hall is giving way to something better. They use continuous listening systems that link specific friction points to specific fixes. They track whether those fixes actually worked.
The question driving their design is not "what is our eNPS?" It is "what changes when the score moves, and how fast can we act?" That shift, from reporting engagement to improving it, is what separates the organizations gaining ground from those still running the same playbook.
Reporting based on data from 86 sessions, 30 direct speaker quotes, and 321 practitioner takeaways compiled from Transform 2026, Las Vegas, April 2026. Speaker attributions reflect session transcripts; some panelist surnames from multi-speaker sessions are listed by role where full names were unavailable in the transcript record.