Is employee appreciation part of your culture, or just another box to check?

A global pandemic, remote work, and The Great Resignation have made employee appreciation feel harder than ever–but the solutions can be simple.

It’s 8:00am on an average Tuesday. You log into Slack and begin your cursory scrolling to see if there’s anything you actually care about, then… bam: a thread wishing one of your direct reports a happy birthday. A birthday you may or may not have completely forgotten about.

This one slip probably won’t be a problem, right? There’s no law saying you have to send every employee a birthday gift.

But maybe you also forgot about the anniversary of their first day at the company. And didn’t send them a note of appreciation on that last big project they took on while your focus was elsewhere. And… maybe you also dropped the ball on sharing the value of their work with your bosses, who might have the final say on raises and promotions.

Suddenly, this series of lapses has turned into a situation where an employee feels like you don’t value their contributions to the team–or perhaps worse, that you don’t even care enough to notice.

You can’t go back in time. But how do you make sure this doesn’t happen again?

Why leaders today are struggling with employee appreciation

“Bad managers” and their behaviors have been written about constantly in recent months. Naturally, there are people who don't have the right skills or experience to manage teams effectively, let alone make each individual employee feel appreciated. However, let’s assume that most managers want to make people feel appreciated.

With that mindset, we can start to consider if leaders are struggling to show up as their best selves at work right now because people are struggling, period.

The last two years have not left many people in a more stable, healthy, and clear-minded space than they were in before the pandemic. COVID-19 itself has left many with long-term symptoms, including depression, fatigue, and problems with memory, sleep, and concentration. But even for those who didn’t contract COVID-19, simply living through the pandemic hasnegatively impacted mental healthacross the board.

With the pandemic also came the shift to remote work. How we interact with each other, develop social bonds, and interpret body language has all changed–requiring leaders to revamp their approach to engagement and appreciation or risk losing talent to today’s competitive recruiting landscape.

All of this has created a seemingly-unwinnable battle to stave off attrition, with more than half of those leaving jobs citing they didn’t feel valued by their organization in general (54 percent) or by their manager specifically (52 percent). With those results distributed almost evenly, where do we place the blame for failing to keep employees happy?

The importance of organizational support

Research from the MIT Sloan Business Review found that despite the long list of alleged culprits,toxic cultureis the driving force behind The Great Resignation. Those cultures–and the policies, behaviors, and attitudes that create them–usually aren’t constrained to a single manager or team.

Toxic culture can turn high-performers into disengaged teammates and great managers into overwhelmed pariahs. When an employee is falling short of expectations, the best practice is to zoom out and look at their surroundings. Are the systems their work depends on failing? Are their day-to-day collaborators not communicating properly? Do they have the resources they need?

Shortcoming in employee appreciation are often viewed without this broader context. At many organizations, day-to-day appreciation is a burden that falls primarily on the shoulders of managers–with supplemental swag, perks, and events provided at a company-wide level. But this model is failing leaders and their employees alike.

For managers to succeed at employee appreciation as one of their core responsibilities, they need a deeper and more nuanced bench of resources to be provided by their organization. That doesn’t have to mean a six-figure budget for every team–it can be as simple as automated tools to help track key events, recommendations for when and how to show appreciation, established solutions for personalized gifting, and feedback tools that make it easy to keep a pulse on how teams are feeling.

None of these options are particularly complex or expensive–but they require consistent, proactive investment in employee appreciation at every level. And for them to be as successful as possible, they need to work alongside a strong company culture that keeps employees satisfied and engaged.

Building a culture of appreciation

Creating a culture that enables an effective employee appreciation strategy means leaders at the very top of an organization need to honestly take account of what’s working and what isn’t. To do so, we recommend starting with looking for the red flags that might be hiding in plain sight. Then, begin to explore the kinds of events, gifting strategies, and other appreciation tactics that fit the unique needs of your organization and its teams. ‍

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