With Anxiety in the Air, Recognizing Employees Has Never Mattered as Much as It Does Now
It’s one of the oldest clichés around: overworked and underappreciated. It’s also never been truer that—with so much anxiety in the workforce, about the economy and layoffs and AI taking everybody’s jobs—employees need to feel especially valued.
The employee recognition platform Workhuman, in a Human Workplace Index report from earlier this year, found that more than half of employees feel just somewhat valued at work or not at all valued, while nearly 30% have felt invisible at times. “Feeling seen and visible is a crucial part of employee productivity and engagement,” the company said. “What we know to be true is that engaged employees lead to better business outcomes.”
More recently, Workhuman teamed with the research company Gallup on the report “From Praise to Profits: The Business Case for Recognition at Work,” which served to cement the case that employee recognition is a powerful tool leaders have to drive engagement and performance.
In a large-scale analysis across hundreds of organizations and thousands of teams across the globe, Gallup and Workhuman found that if a business of 10,000 doubled the number of employees who receive recognition or praise for their work, they could realize a 9% increase in productivity, a 22% decrease in safety incidents and a 22% decline in absenteeism.
Furthermore, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for an organization with 10,000 workers, Gallup estimates that could result in as much as $92 million in gained productivity alone. The analysis also found organizations can experience $2.8 million saved due to decreased workplace safety incidents and more than $3.2 million saved due to fewer unscheduled absences.
Yet despite those findings, the potential of employee recognition remains untapped for many organizations.
“Although the science validates the practical value of recognition, very few business leaders are taking employee recognition seriously enough to see the benefits,” said Gallup’s global practice leader Ed O’Boyle, noting that just 2 in 10 business leaders say it is a major strategic priority of their orgs.
I sat down with Ed at Workhuman’s annual conference, Workhuman Live, last week in San Diego, and asked why it’s more important than ever that employees are recognized for their contributions at work.
“Over the past two years, overall engagement for employees was never really great, and now it’s even fallen a little bit,” he said. “About half of people come into work non-engaged. It’s unprecedented that workers are feeling less connected to the organizations they’re in.”
And yet, as employees have never had to juggle so much both at their jobs and in their personal lives, be it childcare or elder-care issues or what have you, they’ve never needed quite so much understanding—and help—from their employers. “They’re looking at their workplaces to help them sort and manage all of that, when in the past, it was, ‘Sorry, I’m at work, so I have to be at work,’” as Ed put it.
Despite the shaky economic outlook, increasingly pressured job market and assorted fears among employees right now, still half of employees are looking for or open to other work opportunities, Ed pointed out—while 70% think it’s a pretty good time to look for another job if they needed to.
What can employers do to better support their people in these times of anxiety? Communication, of course.
“I think uncertainty in exceptional workplaces is minimized through the transparency of leaders talking about what they know and what they don’t know,” Ed told me. “They did a marvelous job during the pandemic in saying what they did and did not know, but they’ve pulled back from some of those excellent communications they were doing.”
The result, of course, is that with so many unknowns, employees are left feeling more hopeless, and nervous about the future.
Bottom line: bosses can make people feel more seen, more productive, more energized, and less fearful just all by simply leveling with them.
And isn’t that the way it’s always been?
