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Stat Links
- Gallup found that when employees do not receive appreciation for their work, they are 2x as likely to leave the next year.
- Another study by Gallup found that employees who were recognized were 45% less likely to change organizations two years later.
- According to Gallup, only 1 in 3 workers in the U.S. strongly agree that they “received recognition or praise for doing good work in the past seven days.
- A survey by Wakefield Research found that 67% saying they don’t always feel appreciated at work.
Transcript
In this episode, we’re going to talk about the mistake that people sometimes make when they give appreciation to people.
Now, appreciation is important, of course, because for one, it lets people know that they’re on track, that they’re doing a good job. It lets people know that they’re recognized, that they’re noticed, that their work is noticed, that it’s important. It can encourage the right behaviors you want. And it’s part of good feedback and building a good culture, a good culture in your organization.
And the stats show what’s important too from a different aspect because different studies from Gallup has shown that people are much more likely to stay within the company when they are shown appreciation.
So you want to show appreciation to people. And if you want to see some of those stats, you can go to my website. I have the episode on it and you can see the stats on that page.
The mistake too often made…
It’s important, but there’s a mistake that you can make that can really hurt it. And that mistake is when you try to put a negative with the appreciation.
Now, it’s okay in a good thing to have those feedback conversations with people, you talking with one another that this is what went well, it’s like a debrief after something, this is what went well, this is what can be improved. Those are good things. You can put positive and negative together, you should have a culture where that’s normal, the feedback is normal.
However, when you’re just showing appreciation to people, always putting a negative in it, just hurts it.
For example, you might say something like, “You did a great job with the client, but you should have done this.” Or maybe with your kids, “Hey, great job cleaning your room, but you still got a mess right here.”
When you do things like that, that just takes away from the positive. Often it’s just seen as you’re putting that positive to try to make the negative feel better, don’t see that, they see the negative that you say. It can also come across really fake when all you do is give appreciation just so you can give some feedback.
Again, you want the culture where open feedback is normal. People have a growth mindset and it’s normal to show appreciation, what someone did well, it’s normal for people to share with one another how to improve because the mentality isn’t about “Oh no, status, image, oh no, it’s going to make me look bad.”
They’re about growing. If you have the right mindset, feedback should be just a normal and it should be encouraged in your organization.
So you shouldn’t feel like you have to show appreciation or something positive or give the sandwich to be able to give feedback. That should be normal. You want to grow that to be a normal thing. And there’s different aspects that you can do to grow that. I think I’ve discussed before, if not, we can do an episode on that.
Unless you are having one of those debriefs that’s going over what went well, but didn’t, how to improve, do your best to make it separate. When you’re showing appreciation, just give appreciation. And when you want to give feedback, give feedback.
Again, it’s not that you can never put things together, but especially don’t do it all the time and make sure it’s not, you’re not giving appreciation to try to cover up and make the feedback feel better.
Something to think about. See you next time.
