Staffbase has announced the winners of its 2026 VOICES Awards across four regional events covering the Americas, Asia Pacific and Japan, DACH, and UKIMEA.
The company, which describes itself as the first AI-native employee experience platform, recognized organizations that have fundamentally changed how they reach and engage their entire workforce.
Across all four regions, the majority of winning programs registered 80 to 100% of their workforce on their employee experience platform, including deskless and frontline workers that legacy intranets routinely leave behind.
The winning programs demonstrated sustained adoption, with employees returning to the platform, trusting the information there, and embedding it into their daily workflows and operational processes.
“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 frames this infrastructure as the AI Quality Layer, the system that defines what AI draws from, controls how it communicates, and learns from what employees actually need.
In the Americas, JBS (AEP) won Best Frontline App by connecting 48,000 active users across its operations, while Custom Ink reported 98% open rates on leadership messages after winning Best Use of Email.
Among Americas finalists, Garney reported roughly $14 million in estimated productivity savings, 97% first-year adoption, and a nine-point drop in turnover among hourly workers after tackling what it described as “our most difficult to reach audience.”
In the APJ region, Australian Red Cross Lifeblood won Best Launch for registering 50% of its people before 11am on day one, reportedly a Staffbase record, while generating three times the old platform’s full-year engagement within the first month.
In the DACH region, GMH Gruppe won Best Employee Communication Campaign for a safety initiative built on employees narrating their own accidents, which drove a 20% drop in reportable accidents and roughly €74,000 in saved costs.
ALDI SÜD claimed two DACH awards off a single platform, ALDIgo, with 98% of its 50,000 employees on the app, 94% of them non-desk workers, and comment rates up 103%.
Riverty won Best Strategic Narrative by creating spaces for teams to work out the company strategy themselves, moving strategy-understanding for one’s own role up 21 percentage points.
In the London region, Bellway (BWY.L) won Excellence in Communication for its “Pathway” platform, 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%.
Across all four regions, the winning work reflected a shared principle: solve for the hardest-to-reach employee, and you solve for everyone, creating the trusted foundation that workplace AI now depends on.
