Engagement Starts with Recognition

Last week, I suggested that culture of engagement might serve as a stand-in for a culture of inclusion, given that inclusion is raising red flags in today’s political environment.

To me the language tweak works because inclusion and engagement share many of the same characteristics. Both describe environments in which the largest possible percentage of people:

• Feel recognized and valued

• Believe they can build satisfying career paths

• Are able to enlist the support they need to move forward

This month I want to explore what is required to build a culture that meets these criteria, and look at how organizations and leaders can translate positive intentions into real-world results.

Let’s start with recognition, which is the cornerstone of an engaged workplace— because it’s difficult to care all that much about your work if you feel under-recognized and undervalued. Not just for what you do, but for who you are, and for what both your actions and your persona reveal about your potential.

Being valued for your potential has long been a struggle for those outside the traditional leadership mainstream– primarily women and people of color. Which is a chief reason retention remains such an issue for these groups.

Both the importance and the specifics of recognition have been comprehensively laid out in research undertaken by Gallup in collaboration with the cloud-based platform Workhuman. Their joint report digs down into why increasing numbers of employees feel disengaged from their work. It analyzes the impact this has on both productivity and financial results, and suggests how to address the disconnect.

Gallup began by reviewing the correlation between employee productivity and recognition, which they defined as having received recognition or praise for good work during the previous week. They gathered information from hundreds of organizations and thousands of teams in different industries around the world, and fed the results into a global database.

The results should provide a wake-up call to every organization that takes its people for granted. They showed that any company can increase productivity–how much an employee produces compared to what he or she is paid– by a full 9 percent by simply doubling the number of employees who receive some form of positive recognition in a given week. This can be as a basic as a heartfelt “Good job! Thank you.”

For companies with 10,000 employees, this single productivity boost saved approximately $92 million per year. But this was the median savings for the organizations surveyed. In technology, the 9% increase saved more than $155 million per year. In finance, over $128 million. In hospitals, $114 million. All this added profit by simply satisfying the basic human need for recognition.

These results make clear that humans are motivated by both extrinsic and intrinsic factors. Extrinsic motivators include pay and benefits. Yet on their own, these are insufficient. Of course people want– and need– to be paid fairly and equitably for the work they do. But organizations that deliver only extrinsic rewards (“pay ‘em enough, and they’ll make it happen”) motivate only the most greedy.

By contrast, people at every level become truly engaged when intrinsic motivators are also at play. These include enjoying the work they do, liking the people they work with, and feeling their efforts have value and meaning.

Engaged and inclusive cultures align with our very human need to feel that we’re seen and are a part of something. As the Gallup researchers note in their introduction, “How people feel about their leaders, their team members, themselves, and their lives provides the real fuel for high performance.”

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