2026 EX Impact Awards: 9 Employee Listening Programs That Drove Real Business Outcomes

Now in its third year, the Perceptyx EX Impact Awards recognize organizations that go beyond collecting employee feedback to operationalize it at scale. The 2026 winners span financial services, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, specialty chemicals, and telecommunications. Their programs cover different priorities and operate at different scales, but they share a common operating principle: listening data that connects directly to leader behavior, targeted development, and measurable outcomes.

Here’s what each winner did and how they measured the impact.

What Did Atlantic Union Bank Do to Maintain 84% Engagement While Growing Its Workforce by 50%?

Category: Culture and Belonging

Atlantic Union Bank used employee listening as a culture management system to navigate back-to-back acquisitions that expanded the organization from $24.6 billion to $37.6 billion in assets. When the latest acquisition grew the workforce by nearly 50%, the bank deployed targeted surveys to newly acquired teammates, collecting 266 open-ended responses that fed directly into a structured integration action plan.

The approach treated culture as something to be actively managed during M&A rather than assumed. Despite a 60% increase in survey population, engagement held at 84%, and 93% of teammates reported respectful treatment from their manager. Well-being indicators remained strong at 74–78% favorable. The insights from these surveys now form part of the bank’s M&A integration playbook for future acquisitions.

What Did Avery Dennison Do to Achieve 78.7% Manager Activation as an Early AI Adopter?

Category: AI Adoption

Avery Dennison deployed Perceptyx Activate across its global workforce of 35,000 employees in 50+ countries, becoming an early adopter of AI-powered nudges and coaching to close the gap between survey feedback and manager-level action. Rather than relying on generic training, the platform delivered personalized behavioral prompts and on-demand AI coaching based on each manager’s specific team data.

The results validated that AI-assisted activation produces sustained engagement, not just initial curiosity. 78.7% of managers remained consistently active with nudges. An average of 70% of nudges were viewed during the first six weeks. Employees interacted with the AI Coach nearly every day since launch, and 65.6% of users returned for a second coaching conversation within the first month. For a global manufacturer operating across dozens of countries, these adoption metrics demonstrate that personalized AI coaching can scale without proportionally scaling HR resources.

What Did Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Do to Lift Its Leadership Index from 65% to 89.3%?

Category: Leader Effectiveness

Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages built a five-year leadership development system that directly connected engagement survey data to individual leader behavior through Activate nudges, targeted coaching, and structured accountability. The organization’s Leadership Index rose from 65% in 2020 to 89.3% in 2025.

The most striking outcome involved the lowest-performing leaders. Those who scored below 60% favorability received personalized coaching, training, and action plans and improved an average of 40 points. One leader moved from 38.6% to 100%. Across the broader organization, 93% of leaders created action plans (1,191 plans with 1,871 activities), and 14% of leaders who self-selected feedback-focused nudges saw corresponding improvements in their feedback scores at the next survey cycle. In 2025, AC-CCSWB was selected as the global winner of the Coca-Cola Candler Cup for executional excellence.

What Did C.H. Robinson Do to Reverse a 7-Point Engagement Decline in 12 Months?

Category: Employee Engagement

C.H. Robinson produced one of the most significant engagement turnarounds documented in recent years by aligning listening, culture, and strategy into a single system. After engagement declined 7.3 points, the logistics company unified six overlapping cultural constructs into a single framework called The Robinson Way, co-created with employees through iterative listening and validation.

Engagement rebounded 5.9 points in 12 months, a 13-point swing from negative to positive trajectory. Trust in senior leadership to lead through change reached an all-time high, now 10 points above the best-in-class benchmark. Survey credibility reversed four consecutive years of decline, gaining 9.5 points. Strategic clarity improved 8.9 points year-over-year as the company embedded action planning into the Perceptyx platform, launched behavioral nudges to all people leaders, and introduced divisional scorecards cascading strategy and KPIs to local teams.

What Did Horizon Health Network Do to Cut Voluntary Turnover from 9.6% to 7.6%?

Category: Employee Retention

Horizon Health Network, the largest regional health authority in New Brunswick, built a listening-driven retention strategy that addressed specific friction points across the employee lifecycle. The organization launched nearly 60 initiatives based directly on employee feedback, targeting onboarding, frontline experience, and manager effectiveness.

Voluntary turnover dropped from 9.6% to 7.6%, now 4.3 points below the national healthcare benchmark of 11.9%. One of the highest-impact initiatives was the Day Zero Project, which emerged from onboarding survey data showing that new hires lacked equipment and access on their first day. Equipment readiness improved 6.5 points after the intervention. Managers also drove the effort forward: 120 self-initiated departmental surveys were created in a single year, with one site lifting engagement from 48% to 65%.

What Did New York Life Do to Scale AI Across 12,000 Employees While Strengthening Engagement?

Category: Organizational Transformation

New York Life placed employees at the center of its enterprise AI transformation rather than treating adoption as a technology rollout. Through its Ignite AI and Continuous Improvement initiatives, the company provided all 12,000 employees with secure ChatGPT access, rolled out Microsoft Copilot across its internal Microsoft suite, and assigned every employee an AI performance goal for the year.

Monthly pulse surveys through Perceptyx guided where the company needed clearer prioritization, stronger leadership reinforcement, or more practical examples. Employees now save approximately 2.7 hours per week using AI tools, totaling roughly 32,400 hours saved weekly across the organization. More than 10,000 individual GPTs were created by employees, and 76% report regularly using AI tools. Team focus on finding new ways to improve products and processes increased 8 points to 87%. Teams that had fully implemented Continuous Improvement scored 91% on process improvement focus, compared with 86% for teams that had not.

What Did Sharp HealthCare Do to Reduce Workplace Violence Claims 12% While Improving Retention to 91.6%?

Category: Employee Safety and Well-Being

Sharp HealthCare integrated employee feedback into enterprise safety strategy and governance through a Total Worker Health approach spanning physical safety, psychological safety, and well-being. The San Diego-based system, which employs more than 20,000 people, embedded safety goals into its multi-year strategy and formalized cross-functional oversight through its S.H.A.R.P. Wellness Council.

Recordable employee assault claims dropped 12%. Trip-and-fall incidents declined 17%. Employee retention improved from 89.8% to 91.6%, and the organization maintained a Total Case Incident Rate of 6.1, well below the federal healthcare benchmark of 7.6. Engagement indicators remained strong: 89.8% pride, 87.5% intent to stay, and 82.2% belonging. Sharp also demonstrated transparency by acknowledging where listening data showed areas for improvement, including a decline in perceptions of leader follow-through that leadership communications explicitly named as a focus area.

What Did Solenis Do to Achieve $4.7M in Turnover Cost Avoidance After a Major Acquisition?

Category: Learning and Development

Solenis identified manager effectiveness as the critical lever for engagement and retention after its 2023 acquisition of Diversey Holdings doubled the workforce from approximately 6,500 to 16,500 employees. The 2024 global culture survey through Perceptyx surfaced uneven manager quality across regions and a strengthening correlation between manager satisfaction and intent to stay.

The company’s response started with accountability: 99.8% of people managers were required to complete Culture Action Plans through the Perceptyx platform, tied directly to their team’s survey data. From there, Solenis built tiered leadership development programs (GEMstone for frontline managers, Cornerstone for directors, DirectImpact+ for executives) that addressed the specific gaps each layer’s data revealed. The results: $4.7 million in estimated turnover cost avoidance, a 9% increase in internal promotions, and $175 million in projected efficiency gains from senior leadership capstone projects built directly from culture survey insights.

What Did Nokia Do to Unify 10+ Disconnected Feedback Tools and Reach 81% Survey Participation?

Category: Exceptional Impact in the European Market

Nokia replaced more than 10 fragmented feedback tools with a single, unified listening platform covering its global workforce across 150+ countries. The consolidation brought annual surveys, quarterly pulses, lifecycle touchpoints (onboarding, exit), crowdsourcing, and story-based listening into one architecture with consistent governance, accountability, and action-planning infrastructure.

The annual engagement survey reached an all-time high of 81% participation and generated more than 70,000 open-text comments. A vision and purpose survey produced 12,000–19,000 comments per question on strategic priorities including AI, network leadership, and innovation. Action-plan completion improved by more than 35 percentage points in some business units year-over-year, with leading units reaching nearly 100%. Teams whose managers logged action-planning commitments showed higher engagement in quarterly pulses, providing evidence that the feedback-to-action chain directly influences engagement outcomes.

What Connects All Nine Winners?

Every organization recognized in the 2026 EX Impact Awards followed a best-in-class process: They started with a specific business problem, used listening data to diagnose the root cause, designed interventions tied directly to what the data showed, and measured whether the interventions worked.

To be sure, thje categories are different. The industries span from healthcare to logistics to telecommunications. The scale ranges from 5,000-person workforces to 200,000-employee global operations. Even so, the operating system remains the same: listen, act, develop, measure.

For the full details on each winner’s strategy and results, visit the 2026 EX Impact Award customer stories.