Semos Cloud H1 2025 Product Innovation: Powering Meaningful Employee Experiences

In today’s workplace, engagement is fragile, manager confidence is falling, and employees expect more than ever. That’s why in the first half of 2025, we delivered a wave of updates designed to help HR leaders build a more connected, people-centered employee experience through recognition, feedback, and communication. 

These innovations reflect our broader vision: to bring people, culture, and skills together in one place so that recognition flows naturally, rewards feel personal, managers lead with clarity, and employees feel heard.

Our People & Culture Intelligence platform supports that vision with a holistic approach to employee experience, offering three modular solutions for the moments that matter most:

• Total Rewards for recognition, rewards, and celebration
• Employee Communications for campaigns, listening, and engagement
• Talent Development for performance, feedback, and growth

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They help organizations turn culture into everyday action, with native integration into the world’s leading HR systems: SAP SuccessFactors, Workday HCM, and Oracle Cloud HCM.

Below is a look at the product updates we’ve released so far in 2025 and how these innovations are helping enterprise customers boost engagement, performance, and culture alignment across the employee journey.

First Impressions That Last

Give every new hire a warm, consistent welcome

In fast-growing or distributed organizations, onboarding can feel transactional — a missed opportunity to make new employees feel excited and connected from day one. HR teams often lack the time or tools to deliver a consistent welcome at scale.

That’s why our Total Rewards solution now supports automated welcome gift delivery, triggered the moment a new hire joins your organization. The process is completely hands-off: a preselected swag item is shipped to the employee’s address on file, and they’re notified with both an email and an in-app message.

Whether they’re joining from headquarters or working remotely in another country, every new hire starts their journey with a thoughtful, branded gift — no manual steps or coordination required.

This small but high-impact gesture helps HR and managers create a memorable start, boosting early engagement and reducing administrative overhead.

Recognition That Feels Thoughtful and Timely Every Time

Make meaningful recognition faster and easier

After a new hire settles in, ongoing recognition is one of the most powerful ways to build connection, reinforce culture, and keep motivation high. But too often, recognition gets pushed aside, not because people don’t care, but because they’re short on time or unsure how to phrase it meaningfully.

To help everyone craft thoughtful, personalized recognition in seconds, we introduced AI-Generated Recognition Messages in our Total Rewards solution.

Now, users can simply enter a few key details, like what someone accomplished or the impact they made, and the system instantly drafts a personalized recognition message. You can even choose the tone of the message — whether you want it to feel friendly, professional or appreciative — ensuring it’s appropriate for the occasion and your company culture.

Imagine a team lead wrapping up a project under tight deadlines. Instead of skipping the thank-you or sending something generic, they use AI to quickly generate a thoughtful, specific message to the team, helping recognition happen in the moment it matters.

By combining speed with sincerity, this feature boosts recognition rates, strengthens peer connections, and contributes to a culture of appreciation.

Create a more inclusive recognition culture

One of the hardest parts of building a culture of recognition is ensuring everyone feels seen, not just the most visible team members. In many organizations, recognition naturally gravitates toward the most visible employees. This leaves quieter contributors and behind-the-scenes collaborators feeling overlooked and disengaged. Over time, this imbalance can undermine morale, belonging, and equity.

To address this, we introduced Smart Suggestions in our Total Rewards solution.

When selecting individuals for recognition, users now see dynamic, AI-powered suggestions based on meaningful criteria, like direct reports who haven’t been recognized in a while, frequent collaborators who’ve recently recognized you, or peers in your department who might otherwise go overlooked.

This feature addresses a common HR challenge: how to reduce bias and make recognition more equitable across teams, roles, and regions. By shining a light on less-visible contributors, Smart Suggestions support a more equitable recognition culture, ensuring appreciation flows to everyone who deserves it, not just those who are top of mind.

Raise the bar for recognition quality across languages and regions

Even with the best intentions, not all recognition is created equal. Sometimes it’s rushed, vague, or even worse, completely blank, diminishing the impact and undermining the value of the program.

To help ensure every recognition message is truly meaningful, we enhanced the Message Quality Indicator (MQI) in our Total Rewards solution. Now, administrators can set a minimum MQI score that messages must meet before they can be submitted, helping prevent empty or low-effort messages from slipping through. This threshold applies to all languages, ensuring quality and consistency across a global workforce.

This update responds to direct client feedback: admins wanted a way to discourage “gaming” the system by entering spaces or filler text just to earn points or appear on leaderboards.

Strengthen culture and performance through recognition

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The MQI evaluates recognition across four key dimensions, from highlighting specific traits and examples to celebrating what makes each contribution unique. And because the model learns and evolves over time, it continues to reflect your organization’s standards for impactful recognition.

By setting the bar higher, this feature encourages employees to pause, reflect, and write recognition that truly resonates—driving more meaningful messages, improving program credibility, and promoting consistent recognition quality across teams and regions.

Reward Moments That Matter

Offer premium rewards without the inventory complexity

Not every milestone can — or should — be celebrated with items sitting on a shelf. Many occasions call for something more personal and memorable. But for many companies, offering higher-value or one-off gifts means dealing with complicated inventory logistics or skipping the gesture altogether.

With our new On-Demand Order Flow in Total Rewards, employees can now choose from premium, non-stock items that are ordered only when selected. These gifts, often used for milestones like work anniversaries, don’t need to be pre-purchased or managed in your inventory system.

This update responds to real customer needs from companies looking for more flexibility to offer unique rewards without the burden of inventory management.

The result? A smoother experience for admins and a more personalized reward moment for employees. This makes it easier to scale meaningful recognition without sacrificing operational simplicity.

Leadership Backed by Insight

See how feedback flows and where gaps might be hiding

Recognition and rewards help employees feel valued, but to keep growing, they also need clear, consistent feedback.

The problem is that most managers don’t have a clear view of how feedback actually flows—or doesn’t—across their team. And without that visibility, it’s hard to know where gaps exist or whether their efforts are having the intended impact.

With Feedback Analytics now included in our Feedback Intelligence Tool, managers gain clear, actionable insights about how feedback flows within their team and how their own habits shape team culture.

Equip managers to give better, more consistent feedback

Level up your feedback culture

They can view a complete overview of team feedback activity, explore individual profiles to see what each person has received, and track their own feedback footprint to understand how consistently and equitably they engage.

Managers can also compare their practices to benchmarks or peer groups, helping them identify areas to improve and lead with more intention.

By making feedback visible and measurable, this feature empowers managers to create a healthier, more accountable team culture, where feedback is more evenly distributed, performance conversations happen more consistently, and leadership quality improves over time.

Make Every Employee Voice Count

Turn everyday conversations into culture-shaping insights

Culture thrives when people feel heard, not just during performance reviews, but in daily interactions.

When employees engage with your communications, every comment is a chance to listen, respond, and build trust. But with so many posts to monitor, it’s easy to miss important feedback.

That’s why we introduced the Daily Comment Summary, a new feature in our Employee Communications solution.

The Daily Comment Summary email helps Super Admins stay on top of engagement by providing a daily digest of all new comments posted in the Employee Portal. Each summary includes communication titles, total comment counts, and direct links, so Admins can respond quickly, address concerns, and keep conversations moving forward.

By surfacing these moments in one place, organizations can respond faster, close feedback loops more consistently, and foster a responsive, transparent culture that drives higher trust and sustained employee engagement.

What’s Next: A Platform That Scales With You

These innovations reflect our commitment to helping organizations create workplaces where appreciation is visible, feedback is actionable, and employees feel valued and supported.

From our AI-powered recognition and feedback tools to deeply integrated HR workflows, the Semos Cloud platform is designed to help you build the culture and performance you aspire to.

Looking ahead, we’ll continue to deliver smarter capabilities and make it even easier to create meaningful employee experiences at scale.

See why leading enterprises are turning to Semos Cloud to build cultures that perform and how you can do the same

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