Praise your staff: it works wonders

By News Room On Oct 4, 2023

Hello and welcome to Working It.

This week I wrote for the FT about the pointlessness of getting up very early and exercising (like all the CEOs and celebs do). What emerged from the reader comments on FT.com is that sleep is the superpower we too often ignore. Have a lie in: more sleep makes for better lives, better cognitive powers and efficiency at work 😴.

Thanks especially to “KaLung” for saying what was on my mind about the dawnfluencers who go to bed at 8pm: “I always feel that going to bed early is like giving up on the day — or something people under 10 and over 90 do — as well as clueless CEOs.”

Send me your thoughts and expertise on the link between sleep and workplace wellbeing (have you got those nap pods in your office?) and anything else I should know about: [email protected].

Read on for the importance of recognition at work — because we all need a bit of praise. Or a bonus💰. And in Office Therapy I advise a manager worn down by their employees’ personal problems.

Give staff a bit of praise — it works wonders

We all know that humans, like dogs 🦮, react well to praise and recognition. We encourage our kids all the time, often to the point of giving them a gold star for getting out of bed. And yet, when it comes to the workplace, we forget all this. Yes, we are all working for the money. But a bit of encouragement is an effective and woefully underused way to keep staff happy and engaged.

Don’t take my word for it: a new report from Gallup and workplace culture specialists Workhuman found that staff who say “recognition” for their achievements is a big part of their workplace culture are 3.7 times as likely to be engaged in their work — and half as likely to experience frequent burnout — as those who don’t report this.

Those are weirdly specific numbers. What does “recognition” actually mean in practice and what can managers do to encourage it? Workhuman’s chief human experience officer (yes that’s a job title) KeyAnna Schmiedl says it starts at the top, with leaders — doesn’t it always? She doesn’t, however, want them to be “throwing ‘thank-yous’ around” like confetti 🎊. Instead, it’s best to make staff members feel “seen and understood”.

KeyAnna gives an example of how this works: “This might not be so much about what you are recognising a colleague for, but the how. When you write out a thank you message for your co-worker’s contribution to a pitch deck or project, are you writing ‘thanks for the help!’ or are you naming the ways their help impacted you?”

When managers thank staff in this very personal way, KeyAnna says, it elevates the sentiment from a mere generic “thank you” to making the staff member feel valued. In other words: make it personal 😇.

Staff recognition can be as simple as a note, but we know that financial recognition also works wonders. The bonus culture in many companies, though, is mostly set up to reward front-facing sales staff. It’s an embedded practice that Heidy Rehman, ex-investment banker and now director at Strategy Builders, a small business consultancy, is trying to shift.

She suggests rewarding and recognising staff based on their value to the customer. “What KPIs [key performance indicators] can you give your staff so you motivate them, and they add value for the customer?” Heidy sees many businesses where the KPIs and incentives are structured so that staff are obsessed with their own bonus, and beating colleagues’ bonus sizes (lord, it’s puerile) rather than defining their competition as “external to the firm”.

Meanwhile, there’s probably room for a lot more praise in your workplace: Gallup found that only 34 per cent of employees said their employer had any sort of reward programme in place. And most of those are useless — only 13 per cent of those people rate theirs as “excellent”.

Unfortunately, a lot of this praise stuff is cheesy: Workhuman suggests “honouring work-related milestones, like promotions and work anniversaries”. Hmmm 🤔. Maybe that’s why praising staff has never caught on properly.

Do you have a good non-naff idea for recognising and praising staff? And is there a better way to award bonuses? Send all thoughts and rants to me, in my bonus-free job: [email protected].

This week on the Working It podcast

Class is an often invisible barrier to career progression. A KPMG survey analysed the career paths of 16,500 staff over five years, and found that “individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds (LSEB) took on average 19 per cent longer to progress to the next grade” when compared against those from higher socio-economic backgrounds.

This startling figure was the starting point for this week’s Working It podcast, about how to break the class ceiling in workplaces. I talk to Sophie Pender, a lawyer and founder of the 93 per cent club, and to John Friedman, professor and chair of economics at Brown University, about the ways that workplaces can help to close the career gap.

Office Therapy

The problem: I manage a big team and spend a lot of time talking to younger staff about their mental health and personal issues. They will also miss work time, citing personal problems or that they are feeling “not great” eg with PMS. It’s good to be open, and our employer is generous with support for those who need it, but minor things get in the way of the job being done. Any advice?

Isabel’s advice: Part of the issue here is about managing in a multigenerational workplace, and part of it is down to societal change. As you say, the shift to openness is good: back in the 90s, PMS, and women’s reproductive health overall, was a taboo topic. But we did sometimes hear male colleagues dismiss a woman’s anger with a “witty” comeback, such as “I see you’re on the rag”. Charming.

Post-pandemic, many managers, like you, have an extra “therapist” role to play. Make sure this doesn’t leave you burnt out. For tips on how to minimise lost working time, I asked wellbeing expert Ryan Hopkins, author of a forthcoming book, 52 Weeks of Wellbeing: A No-Nonsense Guide. Ryan says: “If these requests, conversations and ‘issues’ are popping up regularly and derailing business goings on, you can ‘timebox’ sessions for this sort of thing.

“Timeboxing means that once a week you create a virtual/in person open door — giving people an opportunity to chat to you about what is going on. You can kick off by sharing a personal anecdote, creating the psychological safety, which is key for high-performing teams. Not only will your team feel heard and appreciated, but they will bring their full skills and energy to work. Eventually you will find the team will simply chat with one another, because this is ‘how we work here’.”🤞🏼

Got a question, problem, or dilemma for Office Therapy? Think you have better advice for our readers? Send it to me: [email protected] or via a voice note. We anonymise everything. Your boss, colleagues or underlings will never know.

Five top stories from the world of work

Why personal conduct is a growing risk for business: In the wake of Bernard Looney’s departure from BP over undisclosed relationships with co-workers, Anjli Raval examines the “grey area” around headhunters and boards’ ability — and desire — to find out about the personal lives of senior leaders.
Workers could be the ones to regulate AI: The Hollywood writers’ strike has settled in the US, and Rana Foroohar welcomes the success of the union in helping to regulate and direct the use of AI in their sector — and thinks it could provide a template for other industries.
The ghastly modern office needs a reboot: Post-pandemic, workers want meeting rooms and quiet spaces, but what they often get are banks of empty desks. Pilita Clark notes the global shortage of meeting rooms and suggests some solutions.
Can Linda Yaccarino survive working for Elon Musk? This is one of the best business leader profiles I’ve read in ages. Hannah Murphy got a lot of access to new X boss Yaccarino, and it shows.
Jon Kung, the self-taught chef who went viral: I met FT food writer Ajesh Patalay at a party recently and have been seeking out his work ever since. This one does not disappoint: a great read about a TikTok-famous chef I’ve never heard of — but 1.7mn people have.

One more thing

I’m enjoying Jobs for the Girls, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, a new oral history of young women leaving school and starting work during the second half of the 20th century. It has some startling accounts of how many girls’ schools offered their pupils zero preparation for passing the exams that would get them into paid work or university. Girls were prepared instead for early marriage. (Many private girls’ schools, like the one I attended, have closed down.)

Here’s Ysenda on the careers advice handed out in these schools: “‘Don’t get ideas above their station’ was the underlying message from the advisers to teenaged girls wondering what on earth to do next.” 😠

A word from the Working It community

We had positive responses from “boomerangers” after last week’s story about the benefits of rehiring former staff (thank you — we will return to this topic). The best email of the week, though, was about learning from failure, sparked by a newsletter mention of Amy Edmondson’s new book on this subject, Right Kind of Wrong.

Here’s Maggie Fox’s tale of her onstage nightmare, which I am running in full because it’s too good to cut. (Also, I made a bad error while chairing a panel at the Women of the Future summit this week — and this story makes me feel better about brain freeze 🧠.)

“The thing I’ve learned most from failure/mistakes is that the more open you are about them, the more trusted you are as a leader. I once made a hugely embarrassing mistake: as the new SVP of digital at SAP, I went on a company roadshow with our (then) co-CEOs. In Singapore I was onstage with one, in Barcelona, the other. You can see where this is going.

“In Barcelona, in front of 6,500 staff, I called the CEO by the wrong name. The audience started to laugh, and I didn’t understand why. Then I did. I kept going (boy, did I want to get off that huge stage). I did use his name again, correctly, and gave the audience a thumbs up. They erupted in laughter, as did I, and I finished smoothly.

“I couldn’t hide from that mistake, and it taught me several things: no one at that massive company ever forgot my name (which was great for the digital transformation project we were undertaking), recovering well-earned people’s respect, and I did not wither and die afterward.

“I joked about it often, and it, I think, made me human to my large new team — an essential in gelling as we dramatically reorganised and started a huge project (which was completed successfully!) Anyway, I’ve obviously never forgotten it and at this point I genuinely look at it as a positive event.”

Maggie, we salute you 🫡.

Read the full article here