Industry: Financial Services Employees: ~5,000 Locations: Nearly 400
Use Case: Platform Consolidation, Peer-to-Peer Recognition, Milestones, Social Engagement, Culture Campaigns
“Every platform we looked at maybe had one component of what Motivosity can do—but not all of them.” — Grace Bell, Engagement & Communication Specialist, Old National Bank
Old National is one of the largest banks in the U.S.—nearly 5,000 employees, nearly 400 locations, and a culture where leaders genuinely invest. Their CEO has sent a personal Friday email to the entire company every week since COVID. Executives regularly travel to branches for face-to-face conversations. Every fall, the whole organization steps out into its communities for Better Together Days.
The values were never the problem. The tools were.
Recognition, rewards, milestones, and social engagement were scattered across four separate platforms — each with its own login, its own cost structure, and its own admin headaches. Social sharing lived in a Microsoft tool where employees couldn't really engage with it. E-gift cards ran through a separate vendor. And milestone rewards were tied to a legacy system built around physical catalogs, where shipping costs quietly ate into the dollar value employees were supposed to receive.
On the admin side, managing it all consumed multiple people's time and attention — time that could've been one person's job.
The result: a lot of effort spread across a lot of places, with no single home for the culture Old National had already worked so hard to build.
In 2024, Old National replaced all four platforms with Motivosity—consolidating peer recognition, milestone celebrations, social sharing, and culture campaigns into a single hub accessible to every employee, at every location.
For the first time, Old National's "Better Together" ethos had a place to live out loud.
Grace and her team got creative fast. They launched a Badge of the Month program, where employees earn recognition badges tied to monthly culture themes. They built achievements around community efforts like blood donation drives. Their seasonal volunteer programs (including Better Together Days) now have recognition moments built directly into the platform.
Employees started sharing team photos, branch celebrations, and personal wins in dedicated social spaces. The platform became somewhere people actually wanted to check in, not because they had to, but because something real was always happening there.
None of that existed before. And now it all lives in one spot.
Within the first month of launch, 85% of Old National's nearly 5,000 employees had logged in with minimal training or hand-holding. That number has since climbed to 90%. For a distributed workforce spanning hundreds of locations, that kind of adoption doesn't happen by accident. It happens when employees actually like using the product.
Before Motivosity, recognition happened in emails and team calls — small moments that stayed small. Now, a shoutout for someone in Indiana shows up for a colleague in Illinois. A manager in a corporate office can celebrate a branch team several states away. Recognition that used to disappear into inboxes now travels across the entire company.
That kind of visibility matters when you’re trying to keep 5,000 people feeling like they’re part of the same team.
“Appreciation has always been part of our culture. But now everyone has a place to go do that, rather than having to take the time to write an email or congratulate someone on a team call.” — Grace Bell
This one’s simple. Four platforms collapsed into one, and Grace’s team got back roughly a full workday per week that had been eaten up by admin work—juggling logins, managing vendor relationships, and troubleshooting the old milestone system.
And those employee complaints about the old platform? Basically gone.
“Compared to managing our previous platform, it’s night and day. There are far fewer complaints. I hardly ever hear them anymore.” — Grace Bell
This one surprised Grace. Managers who oversee employees across Old National's entire geographic footprint, people who don't sit with their teams, started proactively asking how to use Motivosity to stay connected. It happened often enough that Grace built a formal intake process just to handle the volume.
“I’ve even had very high-up leaders and executives take the time to learn the platform and understand how they can connect with their teams on it.” — Grace Bell
Old National tracks a survey question—"My manager cares about my well-being"—and that metric has become one of their highest-scoring indicators. Grace credits Motivosity as part of that story, pointing to the consistent, visible recognition now happening between managers and their teams every single day.
What ultimately convinced the CFO and CEO wasn't just the culture pitch. It was the consolidation story. By framing Motivosity as a replacement for four separate platforms — eliminating four sets of vendor relationships, four cost structures, and the admin overhead that came with all of them—the team made a clear financial case alongside the cultural one.
It helped that employees would now receive the full dollar value of their milestone rewards, instead of watching a portion of it disappear into shipping costs and printed catalogs.
“What really made them lean into going this direction was the consolidation of platforms. We heavily outlined that in all of our proposals.” — Grace Bell
When Old National evaluated recognition platforms, every other option they looked at offered one piece of the puzzle. Motivosity had everything they were looking for: peer-to-peer appreciation, milestone automation, social sharing, culture campaigns, and flexible rewards—all in a single platform.
A few things that stood out along the way:
“It is a place that you can go to not only quickly appreciate someone, but also put some weight on it, with the ability to use dollars, to use different types of appreciations. That right there is really, really unique.” — Grace Bell
Old National Bank had a thriving culture and a recognition mess — four separate platforms, four cost structures, and a team stretched thin managing all of it. In 2024, they consolidated everything into Motivosity and gave nearly 5,000 employees across 400 locations a single home for recognition, milestones, social connection, and culture campaigns. The results came fast: 85% adoption in the first month, 12,000+ recognition moments, and a full day of admin time back every week.