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:

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:

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.

Feedback is one of the most important parts of growing as an employee.

Most managers don't enjoy giving feedback, but it turns out that employees love receiving it.

Give Regular Feedback

Feedback is all about changing behavior, and the closer you give feedback on the behavior you want to be changed, the more likely it is to change. If you wait until an annual performance review to give feedback, that’s way too late, it’s already forgotten about.

This is a huge opportunity for managers to develop their employees.

Monthly one-on-ones, weekly planning sessions, daily check-in meetings are ways that you can give more regular feedback.

Employees Crave Feedback

Another interesting insight that we uncovered was how receptive to feedback employees are.

While most managers hate giving feedback, employees are actively looking for it.

They just want feedback in order to get better.

Clearly, managers have a huge opportunity here to create more of a feedback culture.

Create A Feedback Culture

It’s not only managers that should be giving feedback.

It’s important to create a culture of feedback in your organization where everyone is helping everyone get better.

Feedback often means more when it comes from coworkers because they understand your day-to-day better than most managers.

Encourage everyone to give each other more feedback and to give their managers more feedback. You’ll see a lot of success if you create a culture of open and honest feedback.

Quality Over Quantity

More important than the act of giving feedback, is making sure that it's high quality. High-quality feedback is specific, timely, and actionable.

When we asked employees:

Our statistical analysis shows:

Managers have to practice giving more meaningful feedback to their employees.

It turns out, according to our research, that not many people are happy at work.

Even worse, when we ask employees:

Our research shows that people are leaving work exhausted and sluggish. More specifically:

And happiness outside of work is important to look at too. Without getting too personal, showing an interest in how an employee is doing outside of work is a nice thing to do.

1. It shows you care
2. Happiness outside of work will spill over into work

As a manager, you should ask yourself what you can do to make someone happier. Even if it’s something outside of work, understand that their happiness outside of work will affect their happiness at work, so it’s worth it.

While companies are starting to understand the importance of autonomy, mastery, and purpose, there is still clearly a lot of work to do.

Employees feel like they don’t have enough autonomy, they’re not mastering their skills, and they don’t fully feel a sense of purpose.

Lack Of Autonomy

Autonomy is so important for engagement at work, so we ask employees:

Results show that:

This is likely due to micromanagement. At the end of the day, it all comes down to trust.

You need to trust your employees enough to let them run with projects.

Lack Of Mastery

According to our data, we see that organizations aren’t helping their employees enough to learn and grow.

Specifically, we find that:

Lack Of Purpose

It’s so important for an employee to understand why they do what they do.

When we ask employees:

We see that:

How is this even possible?

Everyone should know what their company’s mission is. And if an employee is indifferent to it, then maybe they don’t understand why it’s so valuable.

There are two sides to employee satisfaction. The first, is compensation (salary + benefits), and the second, is their overall work environment.

Employees need to feel like they’re being fairly compensated for the work they do, otherwise they’ll be disengaged. In psychology, this is known as the equity theory.

We ask employees about their company’s benefits package. Specifically, we ask:

And what we learned is that:

And we want to know how they feel about their salary, so we ask them:

Clearly something needs to be done. If salary isn’t something you can change, there are ways to offer benefits like more flexibility to compensate.

Onboarding Needs To Improve

Onboarding is one of the best opportunities for managers to get their employees integrated into the team and get them productive quickly. According to the book The First 90 Days³, it takes three months before an employee starts adding value.

Unfortunately, most onboarding processes last about a day or two, when in reality it should be lasting months.

We ask employees:

Not surprisingly, our research shows that:

There needs to be more emphasis on team building, learning, and training for a longer period of time.

Employees Need Clear Goals

Employees need to have clarity around what they do on their day-to-day. They need to clearly understand how you’re judging their success or not.

What we see is that employees need their managers to define clearer goals for them.

Using a tool like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), where you set team and company goals for the next three months is a great way to ensure clarity around goals. Check in on the progress frequently (ideally every two weeks) to make sure everyone is on track.

There is a serious crisis going on in terms of employee wellness.

Employees are stressed, overworked, and don't have a good work-life balance.

We continuously ask employees about their sleeping habits:

And what they’ve told us is:

That fatigue leads to unhealthy choices, higher stress levels, and lower overall wellness.

Employees Are Stressed

The amount of time and energy that employees waste being stressed about their work is causing them to be less productive than they could be. As a manager, you should be doing everything you can to reduce the stress from employees.

That number is staggering. There should be no reason why employees are that stressed at work.

Even scarier,

Managers need to reinforce work stability to lower stress levels of employees.

Employees Are Overworked

There’s no point in overworking your employees. Short term, you might get a few more hours of productivity out of an employee, but long term, overworking someone doesn’t help their productivity, and worst case can lead to burnout.

We ask employees continuously about their workload. Specifically, when we ask:

Work-life balance is an incredibly important part of being a healthy, happy, and productive worker.

The employee Net Promoter score (eNPS) is one of the best measures of loyalty and happiness.

It looks at the willingness of employees to recommend your organization and its products/services.

The way that organizations calculate eNPS is by asking employees two questions about :

The way you calculate your score is by subtracting the percentage of “detractors” (people who score 0-6) from the percentage of “promoters” (people who score 9 or 10).
People who score 7 or 8 aren’t included because they’re seen as being neutral.

We continuously measure the eNPS from thousands of organizations all over the world, and have found some interesting insights.

When we ask the question:

We found that the average eNPS is 23, which is considered a good score.

Here is the full breakdown of that question:

Interestingly, for the second question:

Globally, this scored a 00, which is an excellent score.

Here is the full breakdown of that question:

What this tells us is that:

Managers are missing out on an incredible opportunity to develop closer relationships with their employees.

We asked employees to rate how close they felt with their manager:

Here is the full breakdown of how close employees feel with their manager on a scale from 0-10:

The relationship between an employee and their manager has a huge effect on employee engagement.

Employees Want Transparency

Frequent, transparent communication is something that employees need to help them grow. Our research found that:

As a manager, you need to create an environment where employees feel comfortable and everyone gets along well with each other. Building those relationships will lead to more engaged and productive employees.

Employees Want To Connect

Employees want to become closer with their managers because it will make them feel more connected to their organization.

We asked employees if they had ever spent time with their managers outside of work and more than a third said that they hadn’t.

But interestingly, of those who never spent time with their managers outside of work, a massive 00% of them said they would actually want to.

Employees want to get to know their managers and build a closer relationship with them.

Having a friend at work is one of the most important parts of being engaged and satisfied with your career.

But sometimes when we’re stressed or tired, we might be mean to our coworkers without even realizing it.

Workplace bullying is a huge problem, and one interesting thing we see in our research is that when we ask employees:

We see that employees, whether they realize it or not, are being mean to each other.

That’s about 1 out of every 2 employees. That’s an insanely high number.

They Might Be Overworked

One of the reasons why employees feel like they don’t have enough social interaction with their colleagues is that they simply might not have the time.

How sad!

Another indication that this could be a sign of them being overworked is we also found that 20% of employees wish their colleagues contributed more.

There are two things that managers can do to alleviate this.

1. Force those social connections
2. Set better expectations

It’s important that you encourage your team to get to know each other.

Organizing team building activities or other events to create those social interactions is a great idea.

Also, employees shouldn’t be feeling overworked or that their colleagues don’t contribute enough. As a manager it’s your responsibility to ensure that everyone is doing their fair share and that everyone has a good work-life balance.

Employees Respect Each Other

There is clearly an opportunity to improve interactions between coworkers. We asked employees:

Our research found that:

A simple idea to fix these issues is to create more opportunities for employees to work on projects together.

As we can see, employees feel that they don’t interact enough with each other, they feel like others should contribute more, but they highly respect their coworkers.

Creating teams to allow employees to work more closely together is an easy way to fix all of this.

Many organizations talk about the importance of culture fit and how that leads to higher engagement.

A perfect culture fit happens when an employee’s personal core values align well with the organization’s core values.

Companies Need To Preach

Companies need to be doing a better job of preaching the mission and core values of the organization.

Employees need to be constantly reminded of why they do what they do.

Remember, there is no such thing as too much communication.

We wondered about how often employees are reminded of their organization’s mission, so we asked them:

These results are drawn from data gathered from companies across the globe. They tell us that:

It’s important for employees to feel like they’re doing something bigger than themselves. For example, if someone works at a pharmaceutical company, they’re not just selling pills, they’re saving lives. That bigger mission is important to keep remembering if you want employees to get passionate about their work.

We see similar results when asking employees about the organization’s core values.

This is a huge opportunity for managers to make sure that everyone is aligned, passionate, and working towards the same mission.

Are Core Values Just Fluff?

Many organizations will have values like “innovative”, “collaborative”, or some other vague word. But do those words really mean anything? Or are they just marketing tools?

When we ask employees:

What we find is that most employees don’t think their core values will help them grow. We can see that:

Ask yourself if your values actually mean anything or if they’re just there because they sound good.