Culture awards are becoming a way to gauge how monitoring centers run

Becklar says its AI-enabled call handling has interacted with more than 15 million calls and signals. A Georgia auto dealership says it earned six workplace-culture awards based on confidential employee survey feedback. Different industries, similar operational theme: award programs are surfacing more detail on the “people system,” and those details can be reviewed alongside traditional service metrics.

That matters for enterprise buyers of 24/7 services, especially monitoring, where human performance under load is the product. A trophy doesn’t replace a site audit, but the underlying criteria and submissions are increasingly a window into training design, staffing maturity, and how much work is being pushed into automation.

What the 2026 TMA winners reveal about monitoring operations

SDM Magazine reported on Aug. 24, 2026 that the 2026 TMA Excellence Awards added a new category this year, recognizing a GSOC alongside the long-running Monitoring Center of the Year awards for SMB and enterprise operations. The program’s structure matters for operators because it implicitly acknowledges that “monitoring” is no longer one shape, traditional central stations, large enterprise centers, and GSOCs are being judged as distinct operating models.

In SDM’s writeup, Becklar won Monitoring Center of the Year in the enterprise category, which the awards define as operations with 40,001 or more accounts. Becklar’s submission details include a structured 90-day training program for new operators, designed to layer technical instruction with communication and real-world experience, according to SDM’s coverage.

Another notable data point is tooling. SDM reported that Becklar’s patented AI-powered Becklar Engage Platform includes an automated virtual assistant and, since its introduction, has handled more than 15 million calls and signals, according to Becklar. For monitoring providers, the practical question is how that automation is applied and how handoffs are managed when the AVA cannot resolve an interaction. For buyers, the 15 million figure is a public scale reference to cite when asking prospective providers how automation is used to reduce waits and handle surge events.

Top Workplaces surveys are becoming a service-delivery data source

A PR Newswire release dated Aug. 24, 2026 says Akins Ford Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram was named a 2026 Atlanta Top Workplace and earned six Culture Excellence awards from Energage, plus a 2026 Metro Atlanta Top Workplaces recognition from Axios. Those honors are based on confidential employee feedback collected via a third-party survey administered by Energage, the release states.

The categories Akins Ford cited, employee appreciation, compensation and benefits, employee well-being, leadership, professional development, and purpose and values, read like HR labels. Operationally, they map to hard outcomes operators care about: retention (and the cost of constant hiring), time-to-proficiency for new staff, and the consistency of customer-facing execution when volumes spike or schedules get thin.

Energage’s own scale claim also frames why these awards are proliferating. The PR Newswire release says Energage has 20 years of culture research and benchmarks drawn from 30 million employees surveyed across more than 80,000 organizations. For enterprise operations leaders, that kind of sample size is why “culture” is becoming something vendors and service providers can benchmark in the open, even if the most decision-relevant artifacts are still internal, like turnover by role, schedule adherence, and quality scoring.

How operators can use awards without getting fooled by them

Awards are marketing, but the better ones are also disclosures. SDM notes that the TMA Excellence Awards stories were drawn largely from award submissions and judged by an independent panel of monitoring professionals. That creates a predictable artifact trail: training duration, technology stack claims, and operational practices that can be validated during diligence.

For monitoring centers selling into enterprise accounts, the move toward published operational detail changes what gets asked in RFPs. Buyers can still demand the traditional proofs, redundancy, certification, response procedures, but they can now pressure-test the labor system too: training time, internal career paths, coaching ratios, and how automation is used to triage, notify, or draft communications without burying a human operator in exception handling.

Where this lands in 2027 vendor reviews and monitoring RFPs

• Ask monitoring providers to document time-to-proficiency: training length (for example, Becklar’s 90-day program cited by SDM) plus the QA scoring used before an operator handles high-risk event types solo.
• Treat AI scale claims as inputs for due diligence: if a vendor cites scale (Becklar’s “15 million calls and signals” per SDM), request a breakdown of what “interacted” means, which event types are touched, and what the handoff path is when AVA can’t resolve.
• For any 24/7 service vendor, add one workforce evidence request to annual reviews: a third-party employee-feedback instrument (Energage-style) or equivalent internal pulse survey results, and how management ties findings to measurable service metrics like answer time, abandonment, and escalation quality.
• If your organization is building or expanding a GSOC, use the new TMA GSOC category noted by SDM as a cue to benchmark your design separately from traditional central station models: staffing mix, tooling, and what incidents are truly managed end-to-end versus routed.