Across this year’s winners, including American Electric Power, ALDI SÜD, Australian Red Cross Lifeblood, and Bellway, the organizations leading employee experience have solved what most still can’t. They reach every employee, including the frontline, and what sets them apart is whether their people adopt and trust the channels they’ve built.
Staffbase, the first AI-native employee experience platform, today announced the winners of its 2026 VOICES Awards across four regional events representing the Americas, Asia Pacific and Japan, DACH, and UKIMEA. Taken together, this year’s winning programs point to a clear shift in what separates the strongest employee experience efforts from the rest: reaching the whole workforce, including the frontline, is the entry point, while leadership is ultimately defined by whether employees adopt the platform, trust it, and act on what they find there.
Across all four regions, the majority of winning programs registered 80 to 100% of their workforce on their employee experience platform. That reach includes deskless and frontline workers that legacy intranets routinely leave behind. Achieving that level of workforce coverage is something most organizations can’t claim. Beyond registration numbers, the winning programs showed sustained adoption, with employees returning to the platform, trusting the information there, and embedding it into their daily workflows and operational processes. The shift reflects a broader move in the profession, as internal communication becomes a trusted destination rather than a broadcast channel.
A trusted foundation for the AI era
This shift arrives as employee experience platforms take on a new role. Employees increasingly ask an AI assistant for answers rather than searching for documents, and those answers are only as good as the sources behind them. The trust, accuracy, and reach these winners built are the foundation workplace AI now depends on.
“The companies we’re recognizing this year have done the hard part: They reach every employee, including the people furthest from a desk,” said Martin Böhringer, Co-Founder and CEO of Staffbase. “What sets them apart is what they did next. They built something their people trust and choose to use. That trust is becoming an organization’s most valuable asset, because it’s the foundation everything else, including AI, now depends on.”
Staffbase calls this infrastructure the AI Quality Layer: the system that defines what AI draws from, controls how it communicates, and learns from what employees actually need.
Four regions, one shift
That shift, from running internal communication as a broadcast channel to operating it as a trusted destination employees actively choose to return to, appeared in four regional forms. Each winner illustrated a different route to the same destination.
The Americas — one trusted source of truth for every employee
Winners in the Americas built a single trusted source to replace fragmented systems and reach workers the old tools missed, then used it to steady transformation through restructures, mergers, and tool migrations. JBS won Best Frontline App, connecting 48,000 active users across its operations. Custom Ink won Best Use of Email, reporting 98% open rates on leadership messages and describing the result as establishing “communication as critical business infrastructure.” Mission Pet Health (Best Launch Strategy), American Electric Power (Best Intranet), Bell Canada (Excellence in Communication) and Acenda (Excellence in Employee Experience) completed the regional winners. Among finalists, Garney, which described its field employees as “our most difficult to reach audience,” reported roughly $14 million in estimated productivity savings, 97% first-year adoption and a nine-point drop in turnover among hourly workers.
APJ — engineering adoption
Winners in APJ treated adoption as a behavioural-change problem to design for. Australian Red Cross Lifeblood won Best Launch for “The Drop,” registering 50% of its people before 11am on day one — reportedly a Staffbase record — and generating three times the old platform’s full-year engagement within the first month, with growth led by frontline teams. The Salvation Army won Most Creative Campaign for “Salvos Central,” keeping a trusted name and avoiding positioning the platform as “another new thing” to avoid change fatigue. Tabcorp won Best Community Group for “Home of Sport,” a voluntary, interest-led community “that feels social, not corporate.” Qube (Excellence in Frontline EX), Metricon Homes (Best Email Newsletter) and individual honorees Grace Payne of Lifeblood (Communicator of the Year) and Alistair Marshall of Healthscope (Communications Leader of the Year) completed the APAC list.
Berlin — handing employees the microphone
GMH Gruppe won Best Employee Communication Campaign for “PASS AUF,” (i.e., WATCH OUT) a safety campaign built on employees narrating their own accidents rather than rules issued from above, which drove a 20% drop in reportable accidents and roughly €74,000 in saved costs, with external validation from the statutory accident insurer. ALDI SÜD won twice off a single platform, ALDIgo — Best Use of Data and Best Frontline Engagement — with 98% of its 50,000 employees on the app, 94% of them non-desk, and comment rates up 103%. Riverty won Best Strategic Narrative by creating spaces for teams to work out the company strategy themselves rather than explaining it centrally, moving strategy-understanding for one’s own role up 21%. ebm-papst (Best Intranet, “FANS”), Munich Airport / eurotrade (Best Mobile App, “JETZT”), ZINKPOWER (Best Launch Moment, rolled out in 35 languages) and HypoVereinsbank / UniCredit (Best Internal Partnership) completed the DACH winners.
London — consolidating a fragmented estate into one trusted source
Bellway won Excellence in Communication for “Pathway,” which replaced an estate of more than four million SharePoint documents and now reports 95% registration against a 74% sector average, with voluntary turnover down to 14.8%. Bellway also runs a live AI stack, including an AI podcast and AI-governed navigation, built on top of its consolidated estate. Vandemoortele won Best Intranet for “VDMConnect,” described by its communications team as “one platform to feel part of our ‘big little family’.” Commercial Services Group won Best Launch Strategy after registering 71% of employees in seven working days; Choice Care Group won Best Frontline Champion, lifting visits to organizational news by 152% across a workforce that is 93% frontline; and Kantar won Excellence in Employee Experience for its inclusion-led ERG ecosystem. Among finalists, Kerry replaced 20,000+ SharePoint pages with no assurance of accuracy, and Paulig reached 98% of office workers within one week of launch.
Across all four regions, the winning work reflected a shared principle: solve for the hardest-to-reach employee, and you solve for everyone. As AI becomes a layer between content and employee, the fundamentals these winners mastered become the precondition for AI that employees can rely on.
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