Celebrating the 2026 Honourable Mentions

Alongside this year’s winners, the judges decided to recognize five entries that brought real breadth, colour and richness to the 2026 cohort with an honourable mention. Where the winners represented the most complete, AI-powered visions of the digital workplace, these five stood out for excelling at something specific and important – whether connecting the digital workplace to commercial performance, designing for the realities of frontline work, getting the foundations of search and AI right, or cutting through communications overload. Each is a reminder that excellence in the digital workplace takes many forms.

Now in their ninth year, the awards are produced by DWG and celebrate organizations and teams that have excelled in creating well-executed, high-performing digital workplace environments. Find out about previous winners in the awards Hall of Fame.

Alliander – Field Worker Experience Excellence

Alliander manages the energy networks serving millions of customers, with a workforce of more than 11,000, spanning office, technical and field-based roles. Designed around the real tasks people carry out in the field, its intranet has evolved over more than a decade into a deeply trusted, operationally essential front door – shaped by research-led digital experience personas and the contributions of more than 3,000 employees.

Adoption is near-universal, with 98% of employees using it weekly or more; 86% say it helps them find what they need and 88% that it helps them do their jobs effectively, supported by more than 230 self-service tasks and a striking 85% of content generated by employees themselves.

“A deeply trusted space – operationally essential and persona-led, venturing into genuine employee-experience territory. It stood out because of its maturity, and its evidence of usefulness, adoption and real field-worker relevance. This is a sustained digital workplace excellence story.”

The judges

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BCD Travel – Trusted Foundations for AI

As a global travel management company supporting 15,000 employees across more than 25 countries, BCD Travel took a deliberate approach to AI adoption, choosing to build strong foundations before scaling new experiences. Led by a small digital workplace team, the organization extended its mature intranet and content governance model into a trusted conversational layer, ensuring AI responses are grounded in structured, owned and governed content.

Rather than viewing AI as a standalone technology initiative, BCD used it as an enterprise catalyst to strengthen content ownership, establish a centralized Policy Center, improve governance practices, and create a repeatable operating model for future AI solutions. The work demonstrates a critical lesson for organizations everywhere: AI does not solve content challenges, it exposes them, making governance, trust and accountability more important than ever.

Early results are promising, including more than 94% accuracy in a People & Culture pilot and a target of reducing deflectable service requests by 30%.

“A disciplined approach that combines AI ambition with content governance, testing and deployment, and cross-business collaboration – one of the most transferable AI lessons for our community. They’re thinking ahead to a future where dozens of disconnected agents could confuse people and getting the foundations right now so they’re ready for what comes next.” 

The judges

Northwestern Mutual – Search and Findability Innovation

A Fortune 500 financial services company, Northwestern Mutual chose to invest not in a visible redesign but in the foundations, rearchitecting its employee-portal search from the ground up. Its neural hybrid search combines semantic and traditional techniques so employees can search naturally, in keywords or plain language, and reach better-ranked, more trustworthy results – without having to change how they search or learn any new behaviour.

Deliberately launched without a change management campaign, its impact was measured through behaviour rather than sentiment: a 2.9% rise in clicks on the top three results and a 4.75% improvement in average click position, with a scalable foundation intentionally designed to support future AI-enabled experiences.

“This is the number one opportunity for digital workplaces to get right – the all-important baseline work that unlocks everything else, including AI. It’s an example of invisible search innovation: one of the earlier players using neural hybrid search to improve discovery without adding complexity. It should just work – and here, it does.”

The judges

Robert Walters – Digital Workplace as Business Enabler

A global recruitment consultancy of 3,300 people across 31 countries, Robert Walters retired a legacy enterprise social platform and, in just 12 weeks, built a single, personalized digital workplace to bring its ‘winning as one’ strategy to life.

What set the entry apart was a rare, plausible line from platform design straight through to commercial results: greater visibility of the full service offering translating into cross-sell, referral and knowledge-sharing behaviours.

Internal referrals rose from 199 to 267 – a 34% increase and the highest level ever recorded – while CEO updates now reach more than 80% of employees, daily usage runs at 96–100%, and the move is projected to save around £205,000 a year.

“It’s a dual employee and commercial performance story, showing the digital workplace as an operating system that improves how people connect and understand the business, while delivering measurable outcomes and real behaviour change.”

The judges

Together, these five honourable mentions capture the range of the 2026 field. From commercial impact to frontline inclusion, and from the foundational work on search and AI readiness to genuinely human-centred communication, each illuminates a different facet of what a great digital workplace can be. Our congratulations to all five teams – and to every organization that entered – for the ambition, discipline and creativity on show this year.

Categorised in:   → Digital Workplace Group Awards, Artificial intelligence and automation, Search and findability