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Deb LaMere, Chief Human Resources Officer at Datasite, leads talent management, leadership development, and total rewards for a global software company. Before Datasite, she served in senior employee engagement roles at Ceridian, including Vice President of Employee Experience and Culture. The conversation centered on the underrated link between wellbeing and recognition, and how HR teams can design both in ways employees actually feel.
Wellbeing and recognition are usually treated as separate programs. They should not be. An employee who is exhausted does not feel recognized by a gift card. An employee who is overlooked does not feel cared for by a wellness app. The two practices reinforce each other or they cancel each other out.
HR leaders should think about wellbeing and recognition as an integrated experience rather than a benefits stack. The companies that take this seriously design the moments where employees feel seen and supported, and they make sure those moments outnumber the ones that drain.
Why wellbeing without recognition falls short
A company can offer mental health benefits, paid time off, and a wellness stipend and still have employees who feel invisible. Programs are necessary. They are not sufficient. Gallup research on recognition shows that recognition is one of the highest use and lowest cost levers HR has, and it directly affects whether employees experience the company as caring or transactional.
The HR job is to design recognition that lands. Generic recognition feels like marketing. Specific, timely recognition tied to a real contribution feels like attention. The difference is enormous. AllVoices supports the listening side through an engagement solution and a survey product that surfaces what employees most want to be recognized for.
Wellbeing investments work better when employees believe the company sees them as individuals. Recognition is the practice that makes that belief credible. Without it, the wellness budget becomes a perk that few employees connect to how they feel about their job.
Designing the integration
What does a strong wellbeing program look like?
It covers mental, physical, financial, and social health, and it makes access frictionless. Employees should not need to manage a benefits portal to get help. The threshold for using support should be lower than the threshold for ignoring a problem.
The program also has to acknowledge the realities of work. Stipends and apps are useful. Workload is the upstream issue. SHRM guidance on mental health and empathy reinforces that culture and management practice matter more than any single benefit. Wellness programs have to fit a culture that does not generate the conditions they treat.
What does meaningful recognition look like?
Specific, timely, and tied to behavior the company genuinely wants to see. A leader who names what an employee did, why it mattered, and what value it created builds a memory the employee will carry for years. A generic award, by contrast, fades within weeks.
Use multiple channels. Public recognition in team meetings carries one kind of weight. A private note from a senior leader carries another. Both have their moment. Rewards and recognition programs that mix the two outperform single channel approaches.
What actually works
Train managers in recognition that lands
Most managers under recognize because they do not know how. A short training on the structure of strong recognition, plus a recurring prompt in the 1:1 template, drives more behavior change than a flashy launch. SHRM research on the power of thank you reinforces that simple, consistent practice beats elaborate programs.
The manager layer is where the practice either compounds or fizzles. A trained manager produces dozens of meaningful recognition moments a quarter. An untrained one produces a few generic ones. The gap is enormous over a year.
Tie wellbeing offers to actual workload
A wellness stipend without a sustainable workload is an apology. The integrity of the program depends on whether the company addresses the upstream conditions that make the offer feel like a band aid. Workload conversations belong in 1:1s and in calibration sessions, not just in benefits open enrollment. Occupational stress is a workload signal, not just a personal one.
The signal employees read is whether their manager protects their time. A manager who does is the most powerful wellbeing intervention the company has. A manager who does not undermines every benefit on the list.
Recognize wellbeing behaviors, not just outcomes
If the company says it values rest but rewards visible overwork, employees learn the real lesson. Pull rest, recovery, and sustainable pacing into recognition cycles. Name the engineer who took a vacation and came back sharper. Name the manager who pushed back on a deadline that would have burned the team. The pattern teaches the culture.
The signal does not have to be elaborate. Employee engagement rises when employees see that the behaviors the company praises match the behaviors the company actually wants.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Wellbeing concerns sometimes surface as conflict, harassment, or burnout related grievances. AllVoices supports that need through an employee relations function that gives HR a structured workspace and an anonymous reporting tool that lowers the cost for employees to share what they would not say to their manager.
How ER intake supports wellbeing
An employee who is struggling sometimes signals it through a complaint about something else. ER teams that listen carefully often find an underlying wellbeing issue worth referring to the right resource. The blog on AI for on-demand HR support covers how technology can help intake teams catch those signals.
Frequently Asked Questions About Wellbeing and Recognition
How do we know if our recognition program is working?
Pulse survey items on whether employees feel recognized in the past month, plus a check on whether the recognition came from their manager. The combination beats engagement scores alone.
What is the right cadence for recognition?
Frequent and specific beats annual and elaborate. Aim for at least one specific recognition moment per employee per month, and one team level moment per week.
How do we recognize remote employees?
The same way you recognize anyone, with extra attention to written and asynchronous channels. Remote employees miss casual hallway praise and need that compensated for.
What if our wellbeing program is underused?
Underuse usually signals access friction or stigma. Reduce the number of clicks to enrollment and have a senior leader publicly use a benefit to model the behavior.
What is the biggest mistake?
Treating wellbeing and recognition as parallel programs rather than as one integrated practice. Employees experience them together and judge them together.
What's the first step for HR leaders who want to put this into practice?
Start with one team and one measurable outcome. Pick a function where the issue shows up sharply and a leader who is willing to model the new practice. Map the current state honestly: what is happening, who feels it, and what would good look like in ninety days. Share that picture with the team, ask them what is missing from your read, and adjust before launching anything formal. The goal of step one is alignment, not activity.
Once the picture is shared, pick two or three changes you can make inside one quarter. Resist the urge to launch a full program. Run the changes, measure the response with simple pulse questions, and report back. The combination of a focused team, a clear measure, and a public commitment to learn is what turns a good idea into a practice that spreads. HR leaders who try to launch everywhere at once usually end up launching nowhere.
Iterate from there. The teams that succeed treat the first cycle as a prototype, not a rollout. They keep what worked, drop what did not, and write down what they learned. By the time the practice expands to the next group, it has been pressure-tested by people who have a stake in seeing it work. That is the unglamorous work of putting any people-strategy idea into practice, and it is also the work that compounds.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Deb LaMere makes the case that wellbeing and recognition are inseparable. The two practices reinforce each other when designed together and undermine each other when designed apart.
The mandate for HR leaders is to invest in both, train managers as the connecting layer, and pay attention to whether the experience employees have matches the program on paper. Done well, the company becomes the kind of place employees stay because they want to.
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