How Elastic Path uses Bonusly to build a culture everyone helps steer

There's a version of remote work that looks something like this: everyone logs on, heads down, camera off, and never wonders what the rest of the company’s up to. 

Sure, they’re focused on the work. But the focus on the “why” is a little fuzzier. 

That's not the version Elastic Path is living in. 

Ashlea Desroches, Senior Manager of People and Culture, said her remote-first team still feels tight, collaborative, and plugged into each other's work. 

That's not an accident. It's what happens when a company treats culture and connection intentionally.

“It's easy to get pulled into the day-to-day and forget to stop and give thanks to people when they do great work,” Ashlea said. 

That's the gap Bonusly helps close. At Elastic Path, Bonusly has become the go-to tool that keeps recognition, visibility, and culture-building alive, regardless of where everyone sits. 

“Bonusly allows everyone to connect, understand their peers, and recognize them in a way we wouldn't be able to accomplish otherwise,” she said. 

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The road to more connected culture

Elastic Path's journey with Bonusly didn't start as an HR initiative. It started as a grassroots move by their product team, who adopted it on their own, loved it, and eventually got the whole company to follow.

Today, Ashlea leans on Bonusly to help her team stay ahead of some common culture challenges that fully remote companies often run up against.

Recognition is easy to mean, but easier to forget.

When everyone's moving fast and heads-down on their own priorities, saying thanks can be the first thing that gets missed. And on a distributed team, there's no in-person moment for recognition to happen organically.

That's worth taking seriously. According to Gallup, well-recognized employees are 45% less likely to have turned over within two years, which makes recognition one of the more reliable levers for keeping strong teams together.

“Recognition can fail if it's not very intentional. And when you're remote, it's that much harder and easier to miss,” Ashlea said.

Connecting to purpose is a constant challenge. 

For a fully remote company, it's easy for people to feel connected to their own team but disconnected from the company as a whole. Without regular touchpoints, employees can lose sight of how their work ties into the bigger mission, or feel like culture and values are something intangible rather than something they contribute to.

That disconnect is more common than most leaders realize. According to Gallup, only 31% of U.S. employees strongly feel their company's mission or purpose makes their job feel important, which means most people are showing up without a clear sense of how their work fits into something bigger.

HR can’t build culture alone.

People teams often carry the expectation that culture is theirs to create. But no single person or department can build genuine belonging for an entire company on their own. Culture takes hold fastest when it's built by the people living in it every day, not handed down from the top.

SHRM research backs this up: HR professionals overwhelmingly say recognition works best when everyone can participate, not just managers or leadership. Giving every employee an active role turns culture from a program HR runs into something the whole company owns together.

“Culture is everyone's responsibility. If you're not contributing to it, you're not going to feel a part of it,” Ashlea said.

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Building a culture everyone helps steer‍

Since adopting Bonusly, recognition has become a central part of the employee experience at Elastic Path — something no longer reserved exclusively for milestones or end-of-year awards. Ashlea said it's one of the clearest reasons the company has kept its collaborative, tight-knit culture even without a shared office.

Here’s a closer look at the impact Bonusly has had on the team’s culture: 

A tool everyone loves

Utilization at Elastic Path is high across nearly every team. Every employee gets a set number of points to give away each month, and managers layer on extra points for big moments, like running a hackathon or celebrating the end of a big cross-functional project. Those points can then be redeemed for fun rewards. 

Ashlea said people don't just recognize the colleagues they work with daily. They regularly step outside their usual circle to call out someone in a different department entirely, which keeps recognition from staying siloed within the same small group of collaborators.

“Adoption is really high for us,” Ashlea said. “People love to use Bonusly.”

A front-row seat into wins across the business

Bonusly’s social recognition feed helps solve the visibility issues caused by remote work. Every piece of recognition is out in the open, so employees get a running view of work and wins happening across the company, not just within their own department.

Ashlea said the feed has been especially useful for closing gaps between teams that don't naturally cross paths, like sales not always knowing what finance is working on. Recognition ends up doing double duty: it helps people feel appreciated, and it also keeps everyone looped in on what the rest of the company is doing.

“Bonusly allows people to see what's going on in all parts of the business — how people are helping each other out, how projects are getting done, who's working with who. It's really great from a transparency standpoint to have that insight,” she said.

Culture that's co-created, not handed down

Culture at Elastic Path isn't handed down from leadership. It's something employees take ownership of themselves.

Ashlea said Bonusly gives everyone a direct way to engage with one another, build connection, and celebrate wins big and small, which keeps culture growing in the right direction. It's democratized, organic, and truly community-built, not a program run from the top.

“It really does give everyone a front-row, driver's seat to create the culture they live and work in. It can't just be senior leaders who cultivate the culture. It's on everyone, and Bonusly helps accomplish that in a way I can't imagine being done any other way,” she said.

Sharper, more specific recognition, thanks to AI

Elastic Path has also started leaning on Bonusly's AI-powered writing suggestions to help people say more than just “thanks.”

“The new AI recommendations have significantly improved recognition in Bonusly,” Ashlea said. “Before, it was easy to leave it at ‘thanks.’ But Bonusly helps you take it further, to be a little more clear, a little more detailed, a little more personal. I've definitely seen an increase in the quality of recognition in Bonusly.”

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Thinking about partnering with Bonusly?

Ashlea doesn't hesitate.

"You’ve got to do it. It's incredibly low lift — you set your things up the way you want to do it. It has a lot of impact, and it's not a lot of work. You've just got to do it."

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About Elastic Path

‍Elastic Path is purpose-built for B2B commerce, meeting the needs of manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers. The intelligent commerce platform removes the traditional tradeoffs of modernization, combining enterprise-grade B2B workflows with rapid time-to-market, flexible catalog management, and API-first architecture. Elastic Path helps growing businesses create and scale buying experiences that fit their unique business models. Trusted by brands around the world, Elastic Path delivers the technology, expertise, and partnership needed to power modern B2B commerce without compromise.

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