In this fourth and final installment of our series on gratitude at work, we’ll look at steps leaders can take to build a culture that puts appreciation front and center.
The previous posts in this series have made the benefits of feeling grateful and fostering a stronger sense of gratitude in others clear. Workplaces where employees feel recognized—where providing recognition is a core element of leadership—perform better and retain more employees than their competitors. They’re also just more pleasant places to work.
Fortunately, creating a workplace environment that values employee recognition isn’t overly complicated. But you do need to be deliberate in how you go about it. Here are some tips to help you in your journey.
Offer the Right Carrots
Many leaders assume that giving an employee fair compensation and benefits implies recognition of the employee’s talent. Or if that doesn’t, the prospect of scoring a nice year-end bonus definitely does. Both of these incentives, the thinking goes, are enough to make employees feel acknowledged and want to put in their best work.
According to Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick, however, this view is shortsighted. “The fact is that money is not as powerful a reward as many people think,” they write in their bestseller The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their Employees, Retain Talent, and Drive Performance. “While pay and bonuses must be competitive to attract and retain talented employees, smaller amounts of cash . . . will never make the best rewards because they are so easily forgotten.”
Sure, more money is never not appreciated by employees. But in addition to good pay, Elton and Gostick advise, leaders ought to provide psychological compensation in the form of gratitude (what they call “purpose-based recognition”). This kind of recognition is “the most dramatic accelerator of human potential . . . the most effective carrot,” the authors write.
In simple terms (you’ll have to read the book to get more!), purpose-based recognition involves systematizing recognition. When it comes time to goal-set a new project, for example, you would build in time to ensure you acknowledge the efforts of everyone involved once the goals are met. Your employee recognition program isn’t just a Post-It reminding you to send a mass email every few months; it’s a key pillar of your workplace culture.
Show Some Extra Grace
I don’t need to tell you that many American workplaces are a mess. Traditional office districts are struggling, the onsite vs. WFH debate continues to rage, and too many working parents find themselves caught in the obstacle course that is balancing childcare and career success. (To be fair, this has been the case since the 1970s, when women started entering the workforce en masse. But the uniquely turbulent post-pandemic world has ramped this issue up to a new level.)
Under these circumstances, flexibility and understanding couldn’t be more essential—and, according to Christopher Littlefield, are some of the strongest signs you can offer that all your talk about empathy is more than just words. That you recognize the challenges employees face and want to accommodate them in a way that’s reasonable. That you want to create a working environment that, well, works for everyone.
“Whether we are in a health crisis or not, create a culture of appreciation by showing people we appreciate their lives in and outside of work,” Littlefield advises in a recent Forbes piece on building a culture of appreciation in a hybrid workplace. “Take time to ask people how they are doing and listen to their responses. Adapt meeting times, adjust deadlines, and show flexibility and understanding of their circumstances. This signals to them that you care.”
Quotation Call Out "Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it."
– William Arthur Ward
Stage a “Gratitude Intervention”
In a 2020 article for the Harvard Business Review, doctoral candidate Lauren R. Locklear and business school professors Shannon G. Taylor and Maureen L. Ambrose shared research from an illuminating study they conducted on gratitude and employee experience. The researchers wanted to see if “gratitude interventions”—their name for small actions people can take to help cultivate feelings of gratitude in themselves and others—could foster a more positive/less negative working environment. These interventions included forming groups where participants practice expressing gratitude through role-playing; writing thank-you letters and reading them out loud to recipients; and keeping a gratitude journal.
For the ten-day study they recruited 147 volunteers from a wide swath of industries, roles, and compensation levels. After it concluded, Locklear, Taylor, and Ambrose found that the volunteers’ levels of workplace rudeness had decreased. To their credit, not long after this the researchers reran the study, this time with 204 volunteers, to see if it could be replicated. Just as before, they “found that employees in the gratitude condition reported greater self-control and, according to their coworkers, subsequently engaged in less rudeness, gossip, and ostracism at work.”
What does this tell us? That cultivating gratitude isn’t some namby-pamby exercise in feeling good, but an objectively useful tool in the leader’s arsenal. Even a series of small steps (ahem, interventions) can help foster a more positive company culture if leaders treat them seriously.
Give Gratitude, Not Compliments
We touched on the topic of showing gratitude vs. giving compliments in the first article in this series. But I think it’s such an important issue, and such a common source of confusion among leaders, that I’m going to revisit it here. If you want to create a true culture of recognition, it’s important to understand this distinction.
As a refresher: compliments come from a place of power, while gratitude comes from a place of vulnerable sincerity. When you offer someone a compliment (i.e., praise for something concrete they achieved, rather than a description of how they created positive feelings in you) you subtly remind others that you have the power to validate their work. It’s no surprise, then, that many people consider shallow, uninformed compliments—the worst kind, FYI—as little more than patronizing attempts by the giver to look like a good leader. Cheap compliments from an otherwise distant leader can even invite resentment and disbelief. You may very well know this from your experience.
Remarks that convey gratitude are earnest and have no ulterior motive. At risk of being cliché—one I’ll gladly take in this case—they come from the heart. They are meant to build someone up, not simply reward a job well done. Compliments have their time and place, but gratitude is always welcome.
Call-out/Tip
When it comes to gratitude, “big wins” can be overrated. Truthfully, people expect others to be grateful when they achieve some major accomplishment or milestone. I would argue it’s more powerful when someone tells you they’re grateful for a small courtesy you offered or extra bit of effort you put in. There’s nothing like being surprised in a good way!
Make Gratitude-Sharing Easy
One tip experts on gratitude in the workplace often propose is to provide employees with a regular opportunity for expressing their gratitude. The idea is that by creating a process that’s formalized but informal, team members will feel more encouraged to share things they’re grateful for and recognize coworkers who have made them feel grateful.
Christopher Littlefield calls this kind of gratitude-focused sharing a “small victories practice.” Despite their lofty connotation, however, the “victories” don’t have to be major; they just have to be sincere.
Group chats such as Slack or a posterboard or dry-erase board in a conference room are all potential venues to showcase gratitude; choose whatever works best for you and your team. “Either way, it is about carving out time each week to help people step away from what they didn’t get done and celebrate what they did,” writes Littlefield, in the same article mentioned above. “The point is to create a space where people feel safe to share their progress.”
It’s important that the process doesn’t feel forced or hokey. The absolute last thing you want is people performing gratitude, treating it like yet another work task they feel forced to complete with a smile on their face. Ideally it feels organic, low-stakes, and like something employees want to be a part of. This may mean you need to provide a bit of facilitation early on, at least until the process becomes second-nature. Authentic employee engagement just takes time.
The beauty of gratitude is that its benefits accrue to both the giver and recipient. It’s win-win. In my experience, nobody has ever resented being recognized for something they did.
This kind of net-positive interaction is the glue that transforms a group of coworkers into a vibrant, appreciative, high-performing organization. And it really doesn’t take much, apart from leadership’s will. “With a few simple actions and a small investment of time, you can nurture a culture where your team members feel valued and appreciated every day,” writes Littlefield.
I think that’s something we can all be grateful for.