Unrecognized Workers & Work
The Great Resignation is certainly a topic you cannot avoid reading or hearing about. Stories and statistics are everywhere. Record numbers of employees are leaving their jobs – over 4 million each month since August.
One story I recently read was about a 28-year-old employee already weighing a career change when her frustrations mounted along with an increased work load. A new boss was piling on new tasks, all of which were going unrecognized. She was quoted as saying, “It felt like much of my work just went into a black hole without even receiving thanks or a word of acknowledgment.”
This worker’s experience is totally unconscionable. It’s just wrong. We have said so many times, and we don’t apologize for saying it yet again, one of the simplest things a manager can do to express employee appreciation and recognition is to say thank you—and it costs nothing to do so. With all the hand wringing over employees quitting their jobs, employee recognition should be paramount on every manager’s task list.
Something else resonated with me: this worker’s comment about her work going into a black hole. Not only does the silence she experienced send a profoundly negative message about her, it sends the same message about her work—that it has no value.
If work is being produced for a client, and the message is that the worker and the work has little value, do you think the client is receiving value? Full disclosur: as an author I really shuddered because the employee in the article mentioned they worked in the publishing industry.
Recognition is one of the seven universal human needs that emotional compensation encompasses—needs that people require to thrive in their jobs and not languish as this 28-year-old employee was obviously doing. We’ve been writing about emotional compensation over the past months, and if ever employees needed to be compensated emotionally, it’s now.
Employee rewards and recognition is talked and written about a great deal. We have a chapter devoted to it in The Big Book of HR. We hope you’ll get your copy of the 10th Anniversary Edition and take the time to think of ideas to recognize your great employees.