According to the book How Full Is Your Bucket1, the number one reason people leave their jobs is that they don’t feel appreciated.
Not getting recognition for your work when you know you deserve it is one of the most frustrating things that can happen in an organization.
Recognizing your employees is one of the most important things you can do to increase retention and lower turnover.
In fact, research from Deloitte2 found that:
“Organizations with recognition programs which are highly effective at enabling employee engagement had 31% lower voluntary turnover than organizations with ineffective recognition programs.”
Turnover is expensive and engaged employees are hard to come by, meaning you need to do everything you can to keep your best people around.
Employees Don’t Get Enough Praise
After understanding how important recognition is, it’s surprising what we’re finding in our research.
When we ask employees:
How often do you usually get praise?
Our research shows that employees are not getting nearly enough praise as they should.
That number is way too high. Too many employees are walking around feeling like their organizations are ungrateful.
Here is the full breakdown of how they’re responding to this question:
Never
Quarterly
Every month
Each week
Employees Value Praise More Than Gifts
One of the things that lead managers to avoid recognition is that they often confuse recognition with physical rewards.
Recognition is simply the acknowledgment of a job well done.
You don’t need to spend a penny on recognition.
In fact, our data tells us:
This is great news for managers. Recognizing employees for a job well done is one of the easiest (and least expensive) ways to motivate them.