Terryberry Bets on What the Recognition Industry Forgot: Outcomes Over Activity

A 100-year-old company with a new mandate is reframing recognition as a measurable driver of culture, sentiment and business impact—not just participation.

From Platform to Program
Sentiment as a Diagnostic System
Why Moments Still Matter
The Measurement Challenge—and Opportunity
Making Recognition a C-Suite Conversation
A Category at an Inflection Point?

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In a category long dominated by activity metrics—logins, likes and points—Terryberry, the Grand Rapids-based employee engagement company, is making a deliberate pivot back to fundamentals: program design, diagnostic rigor and measurable impact. Led by President Brian Snodgrass and Vice President, Product, Travis Poppleton, the company is positioning recognition not as a standalone tool but as a system that connects personal moments, cultural intent and sentiment data to business outcomes. 

Their argument is simple but potentially disruptive: the company believes that recognition has always had the potential to create enterprise value; the industry just hasn’t measured it properly.

Snodgrass, who assumed leadership of the company in 2025, describes Terryberry as a fully integrated employee engagement program partner that combines platform, program design, and symbolic experiences to drive measurable impact. Unlike providers that focus on activity, he adds, Terryberry helps organizations design recognition programs aligned to their culture, measure employee sentiment across key drivers, and connect recognition to real outcomes—ensuring that personal moments actually move engagement and performance.

For Snodgrass, the problem starts with a misconception that has quietly defined the field for years. Much of the market, he argues, mistakes activity for effectiveness. As he puts it, “So much of the competition talks about engagement as logins, likes, participation. I can get you that. Give out a $100 Amazon gift card and I’ll get you 98% participation. The question is—are people more connected to your mission, vision and values? That’s what matters.”

That distinction—between activity and impact—is where Terryberry is staking its position. Snodgrass says the company is trying to move “beyond correlation and get closer to causation,” asking not simply whether recognition happened, but whether “that personal moment actually made a difference.”

From Platform to Program

At the center of Terryberry’s approach is a reframing engagement as a designed program rather than a deployed tool. “It’s not just a piece of technology,” Snodgrass says. “It’s about defining what you want your culture to be and building a program that supports that.” That philosophy starts well before implementation. Terryberry, he says, does not lead with software features. “We start with the business problem. What are you trying to solve? Growth? Retention? Culture alignment? Then we design around that.”

Poppleton reinforces the point, arguing that program design is not just a differentiator but a necessity. Recognition, he says, is not one-size-fits-all. “The way that we recognize someone who grew up in Salt Lake City, UT, as opposed to someone who grew up in Newark, NJ matters.” What resonates in one culture, team or geography may miss entirely in another. “If you get that wrong,” he suggests, “you can actually lose your best employees.”

He compares the industry’s shorthand thinking to simplistic health advice. Saying recognition always improves engagement, he says, is like saying running automatically makes people healthier. “That’s dangerously simplistic.”

Sentiment as a Diagnostic System 

One area in which Terryberry is pushing hard is in measurement, they say—specifically, in using sentiment as a diagnostic engine rather than a passive score. The company breaks sentiment into six core indicators: purpose, leadership, well-being, equity, empowerment, and belonging. “We’re not just measuring engagement,” Poppleton explains. “We’re diagnosing culture.”

That diagnostic capability allows for more nuanced insights, including ones that challenge easy assumptions. A team might be highly recognized and still show low sentiment. “That tells you something,” he says. “Maybe they’re burned out. Maybe they’re overperforming without opportunity. That’s where the real insight is.” Snodgrass says the goal is not just visibility but action. Terryberry wants to see how recognition is distributed, how it connects to sentiment scores and where the disconnects are. That, he says, is how organizations begin to identify real risks and opportunities.

The company supports everything from flagship annual engagement surveys to pulse surveys, onboarding surveys, exit surveys and deeper drill-downs into specific issues. The idea, Poppleton says, is to use diagnostics the way a physician uses an exam: understand the condition first, then prescribe intelligently. They recommend starting and ending every program with a benchmark survey 

Why Moments Still Matter

For all the emphasis on data, both leaders keep returning to something more human: the power of moments. “Personal moments still matter—more than anything,” Snodgrass says. “If you miss that, the whole thing falls apart.” For Terryberry, recognition is not just about frequency. It is about whether the experience is meaningful. Automated milestones and points distribution may make administration easier, but Snodgrass argues that if the recognition is not turned into a memorable moment, “it disappears.”

That belief extends to the company’s longstanding defense of symbolic recognition. “Symbolic awards aren’t dead,” Snodgrass says flatly. Done right, he argues, they create lasting value because they become visible, tangible reminders of achievement that sit on one’s desk for years. They do more than mark a moment; they keep reinforcing it and the organization's brand and values.

“It’s not just the initial dopamine hit,” he says. “It’s the repeated reinforcement—every time you see it, every time you talk about it.” Poppleton agrees and says the distinction matters. Not all rewards, he notes, carry the same emotional or behavioral weight. Some create lasting meaning; others vanish into consumption. Terryberry’s view is that recognition should be designed to endure.

That is also why the company favors curation over commoditization. The issue is not whether employees can redeem for their selection of merchandise, gift cards or experiences. It is whether the reward structure reinforces meaning or simply mimics compensation. A program overloaded with convenience risks becoming transactional. A program designed around commemoration and relevance has a much better chance of shaping culture.

The Measurement Challenge—and Opportunity

Both executives acknowledge that proving ROI remains difficult, but neither treats that as an excuse to avoid the challenge. “We absolutely start with a business case,” Snodgrass says. “What are you trying to achieve? Then we build and measure against that.” At the same time, they are wary of false precision. Poppleton cautions against simplistic formulas that claim recognition directly produces financial outcomes in a tidy, linear way. Human behavior, he argues, is more complex than that.

Still, the ambition is clear. Terryberry wants to work with clients to connect engagement to real organizational goals—whether around safety, retention, performance or broader cultural alignment. In that sense, sentiment tracking is not the final destination. It is the diagnostic layer that makes better decisions possible, and it gives clients a reason to share data they might have withheld in the past. 

Making Recognition a C-Suite Conversation

A major hurdle, both men acknowledge, is that recognition still too often fails to reach C-suite focus in the organization. Snodgrass frames the issue in executive terms. A CEO, he says, is fundamentally asking three questions: How do I grow the business? How do I become more efficient? And what don’t I know? Engagement programs, properly designed, should help answer all three. “What do you know about how your employees connect to your mission?” Snodgrass asks. “That’s a blind spot for most leaders.”

Poppleton says Terryberry is also trying to help HR leaders translate engagement into executive language. That means better reports, sharper narratives and more actionable insights. It also means taking advantage of emerging analytical capabilities. With the company’s new AI-enhanced reporting system being rolled out this year, “You’ll be able to ask simple questions—what’s the relationship between wellness and engagement? Between recognition and turnover?” he says. “That’s where this is going.”

In that future, they believe AI does not replace the human element of recognition; it helps organizations see where human moments matter most. It can surface patterns, flag timing issues and reveal cultural blind spots that might otherwise remain hidden. In Poppleton’s view, that could make recognition more human, not less.

A Category at an Inflection Point?

Both leaders are clear-eyed about the broader market. The recognition industry, Snodgrass says, has done a great deal to modernize technology, but has too often stopped there. “It has become too focused on tools instead of results,” he says. Terryberry’s bet is that the next phase of the category will belong to companies that can prove they are creating value rather than simply generating activity. “We have to deliver business outcomes,” Snodgrass says. “That’s the future.”

Poppleton puts it more bluntly: “We’re trying to do the right thing—even if it’s harder to sell. Because in the long run, that’s what actually creates value.”

Terryberry’s repositioning is more than a branding exercise. It is an argument about what the recognition industry should have been measuring all along. Recognition, in this view, is not just a feel-good activity or a participation engine but part of an employee engagement ecosystem—one that can shape culture, strengthen belonging, surface risk and create enterprise value when it is properly designed, diagnosed and measured. The opportunity has always been there. The difference now is that Terryberry wants to build the program around it.