News Archive | BI WORLDWIDE

BI WORLDWIDE publishes The New Rules of Engagement® global employee inspiration research report

gthompson — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:42:08 +0000

January 27, 2026

BI WORLDWIDE publishes The New Rules of Engagement® global employee inspiration research report

BI WORLDWIDE has launched their latest global engagement report and will host two live webinars to examine and expand on the contents.

The New Rules of Engagement® global employee inspiration research report is a collection of 11 workplace trends, including recognition, feedback, workplace change, AI, deskless and frontline employees, milestones, compensation, and communication.

BI WORLDWIDE partnered with a United States panel company and the panel company’s global partners to target English-speaking employees of companies with 1,000 employees or more.

After completing data quality procedures, a total of 2,192 surveys were included with 1,088 of those being U.S. surveys and 1,104 being non-U.S. surveys. A total of 18 countries on five continents were represented in the surveys from twenty industries, including healthcare, consumer goods and services, technology, and finance.

The full report is available here.

In conjunction with the release of The New Rules of Engagement® report, BIW is hosting two live webinars.

On Wednesday, February 25, Mark Hirschfeld, Vice President, Consulting and Strategic Partnerships, and Amy Stern, Vice President, Employee Performance, will present the employee engagement-focused elements of the report. They will lead a conversation about their research into the employee experience and how organizations are using that insight to deliver business outcomes.

Then, on Wednesday, March 4, Hirschfeld and Kurt Nelson Ph.D., Founder and President of The Lantern Group, will present the sales-focused research in the report, and will talk about how compensation and recognition work together to drive higher sales performance and retention.

Registration for the employee-focused webinar can be found here: https://info.biworldwide.com/new-rules-employee

Registration for the sales-focused webinar can be found here: https://info.biworldwide.com/new-rules-sales

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BI WORLDWIDE launches Celebration Agent

gthompson — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 19:06:00 +0000

December 15, 2025

BI WORLDWIDE launches Celebration Agent

To make service anniversaries meaningful, celebrate impact, not just time.

Employee tenure is declining across nearly every industry, forcing organizations to rethink how loyalty and contribution are recognized. The median U.S. private-sector tenure is now just 3.5 years and 6.2 years in the public sector (Bureau of Labor Statistics), meaning many employees exit long before traditional five-year milestones. At the same time, the stakes are high: nearly one-third of employees leave due to toxic culture, and another 30% cite poor leadership or lack of recognition (Gallup/SHRM). By contrast, employees who receive high-quality, meaningful recognition are 45% less likely to leave within two years.

The message from today’s workforce is clear: employees want more than acknowledgment of time invested — they want their impact seen, valued, and celebrated.

To answer that shift, we launched Celebration Agent, an AI-powered recognition tool designed to help transform service anniversaries into moments that are personal, inclusive, and reflective of an employee’s full contribution — not just a date on the calendar.

Why Service Anniversaries Must Evolve – Not Disappear

Service anniversaries remain one of the few moments when an organization pauses collectively to celebrate an individual. Leaders, peers, and teams come together to reflect on progress and contributions, delivering a powerful message: Your work has purpose. Your effort has impact.

Yet too often, these moments fall flat. Busy schedules reduce celebrations to generic messages or missed milestones. Fragmented tools and inconsistent processes leave leaders overwhelmed, and what should be meaningful becomes transactional.

The opportunity isn’t to abandon service anniversaries — it’s to elevate them.

Every year of service deserves acknowledgment as a signal that progress matters. Milestone anniversaries, however, should be elevated into highly celebrated moments that reflect both tenure and impact, honoring where someone has been and what they’ve contributed along the way.

The New Standard: Meaningful, Memorable, Impact-Forward

A modern service anniversary program goes beyond tradition. It enables leaders to make recognition personal, invites peers to share authentic stories, and ensures experiences feel equitable and accessible across the organization. Most importantly, it creates space to look back at accomplishments and look forward to future possibilities.

When done well, these moments become defining cultural touchpoints — reminders that what employees do, every day, truly matters.

How Celebration Agent Brings Meaning and Impact to the Center

Celebration Agent reimagines how organizations celebrate service anniversaries by acting as an intelligent partner embedded into everyday workflows. It removes friction so leaders and peers can focus on what matters most: telling the stories that make employees feel genuinely seen.

Celebration Agent enables:

Proactive visibility into upcoming service anniversaries, ensuring milestones are never overlooked
Continuity of storytelling, with access to past celebrations so recognition builds over time
Simple tools for peers and leaders to contribute authentic, collective messages
Effortless invitations that turn individual milestones into shared moments

Celebration Agent doesn’t replace the human touch — it strengthens it, helping organizations deliver recognition consistently, thoughtfully, and with real meaning.

A Human-Centered, AI-Powered Future for Recognition

With Celebration Agent, the future of recognition is deeply human and intentionally designed. Leaders are equipped with a complete impact story — not just dates, but the moments, contributions, and progress that define an employee’s journey. Meaningful memories are captured and carried forward, allowing each celebration to build on the last rather than starting over.

By embedding smarter, more proactive planning into everyday workflows, organizations ensure every year of service is acknowledged while milestone moments are elevated into thoughtful, shared celebrations. The result is recognition that feels personal, connected, and enduring — strengthening belonging, loyalty, and culture over time.

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BI WORLDWIDE and AbilityMap announce strategic partnership

gthompson — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:23:16 +0000

December 8, 2025

BI WORLDWIDE and AbilityMap announce strategic partnership

The partnership aims to bring science-based human capability insights to global enterprises.

BI WORLDWIDE (BIW) and AbilityMap are pleased to announce they have entered into a global strategic partnership, combining BIW’s industry-leading employee engagement and performance solution services with AbilityMap’s workforce intelligence solution. AbilityMap’s platform objectively identifies human skills required for performance in critical roles, then measures people’s capability to perform those skills, delivering high-impact, actionable talent insights.

“We founded AbilityMap to close a gap I saw years ago in the learning sector,” said Mike Erlin, AbilityMap CEO. “Companies didn’t know which skills truly drove performance, or how to measure people’s natural capability to perform them. AbilityMap is like Moneyball for workforce performance — a FICO score for human capability – a simple measure with deep science behind it that predicts who can thrive in a role. Partnering with a company of the quality and history of BIW means we can now deliver these critical insights and business impact at scale to enterprises worldwide.”

The partnership pairs AbilityMap’s capability-based performance insights with BIW’s learning, recognition, and engagement services to align talent decisions with business strategy and deliver measurable business outcomes.

“BIW has always been at the forefront of helping companies inspire and engage their people,” said Peder Jacobsen, BIW Vice President of Learning and Organizational Effectiveness. “With AbilityMap, we now give our clients a science-based way to connect talent acquisition, learning, and recognition directly to the human skills that drive success in their organizations. This creates a new level of impact that drives business outcomes – especially in employee retention, leadership development, and sales.”

This collaboration marks a significant step forward in connecting people strategy to business strategy. By combining BIW’s expertise in employee engagement with AbilityMap’s science-based talent intelligence, companies gain a powerful new way to make smarter talent decisions, accelerate development, and achieve measurable outcomes across their workforce.

About AbilityMap

AbilityMap is a data-driven workforce intelligence platform that identifies the human skills driving high performance and measures individual capability to perform them. Powered by a validated 31-point capability framework, AbilityMap delivers actionable insights across the talent lifecycle — from hiring and onboarding to learning, mobility, and workforce planning. Enterprises use AbilityMap to increase internal promotions, reduce turnover, and align workforce decisions with business outcomes.

About BI WORLDWIDE

BI WORLDWIDE inspires people and delivers measurable business results. Inspired employees solve problems and create value. Inspired salespeople take risks and seize opportunity. And inspired channel partners and customers choose your brand every time. We work with great companies around the globe who know that extraordinary results can only be achieved when their business is energized by the people who make it happen.

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BI WORLDWIDE announces Nomination Agent

gthompson — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 22:27:39 +0000

November 10, 2025

Reimagine recognition: Nomination Agent

How AI is transforming nomination-based award programs

Recognition has always fueled engagement. The moments that matter most in an organization are often the ones when leaders and peers pause to say, “You made a difference.”

Nomination-based award programs capture those moments, spotlighting innovation, leadership, and teamwork that drive business outcomes. But even the most inspiring recognition programs can be slowed down by manual processes, inconsistent evaluation, and bias.

The problem with traditional nomination programs

Traditional nomination programs often rely on manual review and subjective judgment. Administrators spend hours sorting through hundreds of submissions, often without a clear, data-driven way to identify the strongest nominations. Without that structure, bias can unintentionally creep into the process, influencing outcomes and eroding trust in the program’s fairness.

The result? Delayed approvals and missed opportunities to celebrate the people moving the business forward. Recognition should feel inspiring, not overwhelming.

Why it matters

Recognition isn’t just a feel-good moment; it’s a business driver. When done right, it reinforces values, builds trust, and strengthens culture. But when recognition feels inconsistent or unfair, it can weaken engagement and participation.

To maximize impact, organizations need a smarter, fairer way to evaluate nominations, one that connects employee contributions to business outcomes and eliminates bias from the process.

Introducing Nomination Agent

That’s why BI WORLDWIDE developed Nomination Agent, an AI-powered solution designed to simplify the nomination review process and highlight submissions that truly reflect organizational values and measurable outcomes.

Built using IBM watsonx, Nomination Agent uses advanced language models to evaluate nominations against defined criteria, rank submissions by quality and relevance, and present the most meaningful contributions to program administrators and review panels.

By analyzing nominations through a consistent, data-driven lens, the system helps reduce potential bias, increases confidence in results, and ensures the most deserving and outcome-driven contributions stand out.

The result: faster decisions, greater equity, and more confidence in every award without the manual review.

The business impact

1. Streamline administrative workflows

Managing a nomination-based recognition program is rewarding but time-consuming. Each program cycle can generate hundreds of submissions, each representing meaningful work. Nomination Agent automatically screens, ranks, and highlights top entries based on program-specific criteria.

This automation reduces manual effort, ensures consistency across evaluations, and makes it easier to identify the nominations that best represent organizational impact.

Takeaway: Transform the nomination process with intelligent automation that saves time and simplifies decision-making. In pilot programs, administrators reported saving up to 70% of their time per nomination cycle, allowing them to focus on value-added activities instead of mundane manual tasks.

2. Increase confidence and fairness in manager reviews

For managers, reviewing nominations should be energizing, not stressful. Nomination Agent’s AI-driven evaluation helps surface the nominations that demonstrate business impact and organizational values.

By removing inconsistency and reducing potential bias, managers can focus on celebrating success with confidence, knowing each recognition decision is grounded in fairness.

Takeaway: Empower managers with equitable, data-informed decision-making. When recognition feels fair, employees are 11.8x more likely to report a strong sense of belonging.¹

3. Elevate culture through fair and meaningful recognition

Nomination Agent brings together behavioral science, AI technology, and human insight to make recognition faster, fairer, and more meaningful.

By creating a transparent and inclusive nomination process, organizations can promote participation, build trust, and strengthen their culture of recognition.

Takeaway: When employees believe good work will be recognized, they’re 7.5x more likely to describe their company culture as great.²

Looking ahead

AI isn’t replacing human judgment; it’s enhancing it. Nomination Agent gives leaders the tools to make recognition smarter, faster, and more equitable. Because recognition should always inspire, not overwhelm.

¹ The New Rules of Engagement®, BI WORLDWIDE, 2024
² The New Rules of Engagement®, BI WORLDWIDE, 2024

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BIW to host Pacific Northwest executive events

gthompson — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 17:42:09 +0000

November 4, 2025

BIW to host Pacific Northwest executive events

On November 12 and 13, BI WORLDWIDE will host two executive events designed for leaders with a frontline workforce seeking to transform their associate engagement strategies. The events will showcase a strategic approach to program design based on behavioral economics and will feature real-world case studies from Fortune500 companies.

On Wednesday, November 12, BIW will host a lunch event at the W Bellevue in Bellevue, Washington, and on Thursday, November 13, BIW will host a happy hour event at the Breakside Beaverton – Stay Gold Lounge in Beaverton, Oregon.

Christina Fortier, Solution Owner with PerformIQ^®, will explain how leaders can use a balanced performance strategy to clarify objectives, align individual goals with larger organizational goals, and connect the everyday work of frontline workers to overarching company objectives.

Emily Sadnick, Solution Owner with Retail Connect, will lay out the challenges of frontline employees at the point of sale, and how retail leaders can use learning, gamification, communication, and data to drive key KPIs and performance in-store.

Attendees can expect presentations as well as peer networking and one-on-one consultation opportunities with the presenters. Complimentary refreshments and meals are included.

To learn more and register for the November 12 event in Bellevue, CLICK HERE.

To learn more and register for the November 13 event in Beaverton, CLICK HERE.

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BI WORLDWIDE presents at Gartner HR Symposium 2025

gthompson — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 19:58:20 +0000

October 20, 2025

BI WORLDWIDE presents at Gartner HR Symposium 2025

BI WORLDWIDE Vice President of Employee Solutions, Amy Stern, will be joining Esther Vegas-Eddings, Compensation Managing Director at The Cigna Group, to speak at the Gartner HR Symposium/XPO conference in Orlando, Florida. The conference, to run from October 27-29, will feature key topics for CHROs and their leadership teams.

Stern and Vegas-Eddings will present on October 28 at 11:30AM. Their session, How The Cigna Group Turns Meaningful Moments into Talent Strategy outcomes, will cover how The Cigna Group uses recognition and rewards to improve retention, achieve company goals, map everyday interactions to talent strategy, and drive positive business outcomes.

Attendees will have the opportunity to connect with BI WORLDWIDE for questions, follow up, and product demos at booth #439 in the event XPO hall.

Registration for the event is available through the Gartner HR Symposium website.

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BI WORLDWIDE launches Elevate Intelligence

gthompson — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 20:42:30 +0000

October 13, 2025

BI WORLDWIDE launches Elevate Intelligence

Agentic AI that transforms recognition and performance

BI WORLDWIDE announces the launch of Elevate Intelligence, an AI suite designed to make recognition more meaningful, timely, and scalable through agentic AI.

BI WORLDWIDE (BIW), a global leader in employee engagement and recognition solutions, announces the launch of Elevate Intelligence, an AI suite designed to make recognition more meaningful, timely, and scalable through agentic AI.

Integrated across BIW’s Elevate platform, Elevate Intelligence introduces intelligent agents that go beyond generative AI to deliver autonomous, personalized support throughout the employee journey—from day-to-day recognition to service milestones, program management, and data-driven decision making.

“Elevate Intelligence isn’t just a feature – it’s a leap forward in how we inspire performance,” said Beth Sundberg, VP of Technology Strategy at BI WORLDWIDE. “With agentic AI, we’re enabling recognition that is smarter, faster, and more impactful – all while keeping the human experience at the center.”

Each agent is purpose-built to help users take action that drives results:

Recognition Agent enables users to give recognition through a natural, conversational interface – suggesting award amounts, behaviors, and messages without the need for forms. It saves time, reduces friction, and increases recognition frequency across the organization.

Celebration Agent turns loyalty into a shared moment of appreciation by nudging teammates and managers ahead of anniversaries. It uses recognition data to generate an initial message, making service anniversary recognition easier, more consistent, and more meaningful.

Nomination Agent supports winner selection by surfacing top submissions, aligning to program criteria, and reducing bias in the review process. It saves up to 70% of selection committees’ time and brings consistency to decisions that recognize truly deserving employees.

Insight Agent transforms reporting into simple conversation. Program owners can ask natural-language questions and receive instant, actionable results without navigating data and dashboards.

With Elevate Intelligence, organizations can reduce administrative overhead, improve program participation, and elevate the quality and impact of every recognition moment.

“We believe AI should do more than assist—it should take action,” said Sundberg. “This launch marks a shift from AI as a helper to AI as a partner in performance and culture.”

Learn more about Elevate Intelligence at https://www.biworldwide.com/elevate/.

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BIW to host gamification event

jboyles — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 13:20:32 +0000

October 9, 2025

BIW to host gamification event

Let’s Talk

BI WORLDWIDE is hosting an event at Slate in New York City on October 30, 2025 focused on gamification. The networking seminar is designed to showcase how Fortune 1000 companies use gamification to increase engagement and retention.

Speakers include gamification expert Lea Sorrentino, Vice President of Bunchball, a division of BI WORLDWIDE, and Jim Riedel, Director of Technical Training at Subaru of America. They will share examples of companies that have used gamification to successfully impact business outcomes, from productivity to performance to sales.

Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of what gamification is and why it is effective for sales teams, employees, and consumers. There will be an opportunity for conversation with others and of course, the chance to play some games at one of New York City’s most dynamic venues.

To learn more, visit https://info.biworldwide.com/nyc-gamification-forum

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BI WORLDWIDE is a 2025 Star Tribune Top Workplace

gthompson — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 13:33:41 +0000

June 16, 2025

BI WORLDWIDE is a 2025 Star Tribune Top Workplace

For the eighth time, BIW is on the Star Tribune’s list of the top 200 workplaces in Minnesota.

BI WORLDWIDE has been named one of the Top 200 Workplaces in Minnesota by the Star Tribune. A complete list of those selected is available here and was also published in the Star Tribune Top Workplaces special section on Sunday, June 15.

Top Workplaces is an independent workplace research organization, working with journalistic outlets across the US to capture feedback from employees. The Top 200 list recognizes the most progressive companies in Minnesota based on employee opinions measuring engagement, organizational health and satisfaction. Nationally, Top Workplaces collects over 23 million surveys from over 70,000 organizations. In Minnesota alone, over 75,000 employees from public, private and nonprofit organizations participated in the survey.

This is the eighth time BI WORLDWIDE has been named a Top Workplace, appearing in the top 25 on this year’s list of large companies.

“We work with Fortune 500 companies to help them achieve meaningful business outcomes,” said Nancy Martinson, BI WORLDWIDE’s CHRO. “Big, impactful results are achieved when the business is inspired by the people who make it happen. We want to lead the way in what a culture of inspiration can do for a business—that begins with our own employees.”

BI WORLDWIDE is a full-service engagement agency, focusing on sales team motivation, customer loyalty, employee motivation, and channel solutions. They work with companies around the globe to attract, engage, and retain employees, run effective sales contests and incentives, build dynamic customer loyalty programs, and create impactful corporate events.

The rankings in the Star Tribune Top 200 Workplaces are based on survey information collected by Energage, an independent company specializing in employee engagement and retention.

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BIW announces GoalQuest® AI

gthompson — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 19:00:49 +0000

February 28, 2025

BIW announces GoalQuest® AI

Minneapolis, MN (March 17, 2025) — BI WORLDWIDE (BIW) announces GoalQuest® AI, a new solution to drive sales activity and maximize business results. “We are dedicated to incorporating AI as an integral part of our technology strategy,” shared BIW’s Vice President of Technology, Beth Sundberg. “Using AI, we are designing rules structures that effectively boost performance across an entire sales organization, moving the middle, and creating lift beyond the top performers.”

GoalQuest AI is a pay-for-performance rules structure that awards only incremental gains using AI for advanced target setting and insight summaries. With AI, goals can now be personalized to the individual versus grouping similar performers which means goals are now more relatable and realistic. In addition, GoalQuest AI accurately predicts outcomes and the budget as well as ROI based on forecasted modeling. With an intuitive participant experience, participants get insight into how they are performing and managers receive recommendations for actions around recognition and coaching opportunities.

Enhancing GoalQuest, a proven solution with over 1,400,000 participants, with AI, makes this a quick program to launch that delivers sales results within 90 days. To learn more about how GoalQuest AI can drive incremental performance, visit our GoalQuest^® AI product page.

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