Employee Recognition & Reward Solution in SharePoint

I would highly recommend looking into Powerapps for this solution.  Not only to meet your immediate needs, but to also allow for future expansion if your requirements change.

We did something similar to what Cian suggested. I made a Microsoft Form that allowed people to nominate their peers for a monthly recognition program. The form was basic and just emailed a point person with all the responses. That person just tallied them up and then input the winner with some comments into a Sharepoint List. I then output a view showing only the most recent entry of the list on the team's Communication site homepage. Past winners can be viewed on another list view. 

This is a smallish group so it is easy to manage mostly manually, but I could see for a larger group, you might want to automate things a little more. Use flow to put the form responses into a list or something. 

It's an interesting question, perhaps have a communication site dedicated to this, is that what you were thinking of?  Just a few ideas, a nomination Microsoft Form could be embedded so anyone can put forward staff, have a news web part which features profiles on staff members, as well as articles perhaps on what it takes to be recognized. There could be interviews as well, lots of different content might work.

It could be like a center of excellence highlighting key projects or pieces of work that have exceeded expectations and have delivered key outcomes by your recognized staff. There is a lot you could do with this depending on the particulars.