Feature
Now in its fourth year, the Reworked IMPACT Awards celebrate individuals and teams, practitioners and vendors who excel in delivering exceptional employee experiences for their internal employees and external customers.
Earlier this year, Reworked announced the winners and finalists of the 2025 Reworked IMPACT Awards program. This article goes further into winning applications and judges’ responses, to give a better understanding of how the best-of-the-best approach employee experience and the digital workplace.
Practitioner Award Winners
Employee Experience Leader of the Year
Scottish Funding Council is a small government agency with societal impact. The organization is responsible for distributing roughly $2.5 billion to fund further and higher education institutions, and research and innovation throughout Scotland.
Martin Stubbs-Partridge started in the organization in the fall of 2023 with one mandate: improve internal communications. What resulted is an integrated set of internal services designed around the employee experience with inclusion and belonging central to the organization’s culture. In the beginning, he faced an over-reliance on email, a distributed workplace (from a central office to everyone working remotely) and no internal comms strategy to speak of. Martin established a senior steering group to oversee the change.
After a four-month discovery period, the steering group recognized that while the big-picture goal was to deliver an experience fit for a modern workplace, this wouldn’t be achieved in one fell swoop. Working alongside communication colleagues, Martin rolled out an interim intranet to deliver immediate benefits, before deploying Viva Engage to foster a sense of community, facilitate peer to peer knowledge sharing, and simpler connection with leaders. An ethos of “we go together” delivered transformative impact allowing leaders to “learn in the crowd” at their own pace. Targeting Storylines as a leadership channel has seen engagement rates with CEO communications reach 90%. This approach has since landed the Scottish Funding Council in the top 25% of organizations using Viva Engage.
A key component of the transformation has been a new channel matrix that allowed colleagues to take responsibility for knowing “what to use when” and to re-design the information architecture of a new intranet centered on answering questions (e.g. how do I file for time off) rather than departmental silos (e.g. people having to guess which department would have the answer to a particular question). Importantly, the platform supports an ambition for SFC to become an inclusive and accessible employer. It’s designed for everyone, no matter how long a colleague has worked there, or how they prefer to access digital information. Creating a unified design and seamless experience across the website, intranet, Teams and Viva Engage has been central to their approach.
Martin’s channel matrix has become a popular request by digital workplace leaders in other organizations. In 2024, Martin also co-founded the Scottish Internal Communication Network providing a free and safe space for practitioners to share and learn.
There have been many signs of success along the journey, but a major win for Martin personally is his inbox is now filled with requests for strategic advice, instead of demands for postal services that continue to impact internal communication practitioners globally.
Finalist: Becky Lakin, Founder, The Giving Wall
Becky Lakin, an employee experience, communications and community leader noticed a concerning trend on the Giving Wall: the people asking for help were frontline employees working within the nonprofit themselves. The caregivers needed care.
Lakin approached one of Giving Wall’s most innovative and responsive funders, who agreed to fund a one-year employee experience pilot with four small-to-medium NGOs dedicated to improving their employee experience, and scaling the most effective solutions throughout the nonprofit ecosystem within the Richmond region. Becky is now working directly with each organization to learn where the pain points are and what could be changed to improve the engagement, efficacy and impact of these life-saving, family-protecting, community-critical employees.
Finalist: Outhay Lovan, Chief Strategy Officer, VizyPay
Her leadership fosters an inclusive workplace culture and her strategic emphasis on employee development and mentorship has led to high levels of engagement and retention. Lovan also looks beyond the internal employee experience to the external one with programs like the Look Local First (LLF) initiative, engaging the local community through support of small businesses and local entrepreneurs.
Employee Journey Innovation
Gold: Tech Partnerships, Acceleration & Culture Transformation department, TIAA
The Tech Partnerships, Acceleration & Culture Transformation organization at secure retirement and investment solutions provider, TIAA, was tasked with powering the business strategic shift and fueling innovation while transforming the core of their enterprise, readying the workforce for the next generation of AI and Machine Learning technologies. They are addressing this objective with the help of the Guild Network (GN) program, a social learning and development program designed to uplift talent.
As one judge noted, “What impressed me most was the strategic clarity and comprehensive approach they showcased. The answers demonstrate a well-thought-out plan. They show an alignment between the organizational needs and the development of a sustainable, innovative learning culture that goes beyond just addressing the immediate challenges.”
Vendor Award Winners
Excellence in Employee Intranet & Communication Platforms
Gold: Simpplr
One of Simpplr’s customers — a software company with more than 2,000 employees globally — needed a new intranet as their original homegrown system lacked the responsiveness needed when communicating with a global team. Simpplr’s solution resulted in enhanced communication efficiency, with a significant reduction in reliance on email. Further, the 95% adoption rate resulted in a 20% increase in employee efficiency.
Silver: Sociabble
A global cosmetics and pharmaceuticals leader partnered with Sociabble to overcome their internal communication challenges. Sociabble’s tailored, mobile-first platform addressed all of its customer’s communication challenges by offering a centralized hub for all internal communications. Being able to reach the customer’s deskless workers was a key point of success for the new solution.
Most Innovative Workplace Productivity Solution
Gold: NICE
Dutch Railways, a European transportation company, recognized that they needed to do more than change technology platforms to improve the employee experience — they needed to change the business as well. They partnered with NICE to implement NICE CXone and NICE Workforce Management solutions. In addition, they re-organized NICE’s solutions and skills around distinct customer journeys and brought in its exclusive true to Interval (TTI) technology, an exclusive feature of NICE WFM, to support handling blended synchronous and asynchronous interactions to utilize activity-based staffing requirements. This enabled 90% of the railway’s agents to handle interactions across voice and digital channels. Between the new technology and business realignment, NICE achieved all the program goals for their customer, boosting both employee and customer experience while reducing operational costs at the same time.
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Silver: ActivTrak
A North American parts supplier had been undergoing tripod expansion and needed a way to measure success and maintain high productivity and performance across its distributed workforce. They chose ActivTrak’s workforce analytics solution to tackle these challenges. The resulting insights gleaned from ActivTrak’s platform delivered a 45x ROI and an 18% increase in overall employee productivity.
Methodology
Final winner determination is at the sole discretion of Reworked’s Research and Editorial departments. Applicants who may be customers of Reworked and Simpler Media Group have no influence in the selection of award winners. In addition, organizations who apply for the practitioner awards must reference their company’s internal policies, processes, workflows and outcomes. Organizations who use the practitioner awards to reference their products or services are disqualified.
Judging is done by a group of volunteers, who are practitioners, consultants and otherwise experts in their respective fields. Applications are scored according to a weighted rubric and multiple judges review each application to ensure consensus. Judges are not given applications within their industries and are required to recuse themselves of any application that might be a conflict of interest to avoid bias.
Learn more about the Reworked IMPACT Awards here.
