Making Employee Recognition an Everyday Habit

Hannah Beasley
Non-Desk Matters
Published in
2 min readOct 23, 2017

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Can you remember the last time your manager or immediate supervisor gave you positive feedback? Do you have a folder in your email inbox where you keep encouraging emails in case you need to read them on a bad day?

If you’re anything like me, you can answer ‘yes’ to both of those questions.

Acknowledgement and feedback from your manager is necessary, encouraging, impactful, and lasting.

In a previous post on Non-Desk Matters, we defined the ‘Critical Middle’ as the middle management layer that is critical to the overall success, health, and potential wealth of an organization. These managers are ‘the glue that holds an organization together’ — they provide the bond between management and front-line workers.

‘Critical Middle’ managers directly interact with employees on a daily basis and therefore, they are the most important leaders providing regular kudos, compliments, and acknowledgment in every organization.

“In a recent Gallup workplace survey, employees were asked to recall who gave them their most meaningful and memorable recognition. The data revealed the most memorable recognition comes most often from an employee’s manager (28%), followed by a high-level leader or CEO (24%), the manager’s manager (12%), a customer (10%) and peers (9%). Worth mentioning, 17% cited “other” as the source of their most memorable recognition.” (Source)

In Marcus Buckingham’s book First, Break All the Rules, he further explains the critical role of this immediate supervisor relationship:

“The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.

Recognition plays a critical role in this relationship.

In theory, every manager knows that employee recognition is a good idea. Great managers put this theory into practice by integrating daily acknowledgement into their routine.

This effort is even more important as an increasing number of Millennials have entered the workplace.

According to this Fortune article, “Appreciating great work has moved far beyond the traditional quarterly or annual performance review — it is now expected to come in the form of spontaneous and frequent expressions of recognition, given in everyday work life.” (Source)

So, what frequency should you aim for? Employees are happiest when they receive some form of recognition every seven days. (Source). This may seem like a lot if your frame of reference is formal performance reviews and 1:1 feedback sessions, but managers must rethink the paradigm. Look for opportunities to praise in your everyday interactions. Build acknowledgement into your daily habits — don’t wait for the right opportunity. When you see an employee doing a good job, simply say it out loud.

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Excited / hopeful / fast-paced. Advocate for Millennials & obsessed with developing the next generation of leaders. Mobile tech + internal comms @redeapp.