Recognition is one of the things that we need as humans; to know that we are accomplishing our goals and that we are appreciated by our mentors and peers. Receiving recognition for good work is one of the driving factors keeping us going and stops us from burning out and wanting to walk away from a job we otherwise love. Recently a Diary Detox survey found that 52% of people would rather have a new boss than a pay rise. Tom, our PR guy used to have a boss like this. Here’s what happened to him, and his thoughts on how your managers can prevent their people from leaving.

Remember the last time you toiled night and day to get a piece of work ready for your manager? Pouring heart and soul into a piece of work, believing it will all pay off in the end? It’s a great feeling isn’t it? But imagine if you put all of that effort into a project and received no recognition at all. Evidence suggests people not feeling their contribution is recognised in the workplace ultimately pushes them to leave.

This happened to me.

I was working for a business that was looking to revamp their website. One of the main aspects of this revamp was creating a new blog filled with meaningful content. The company wanted to be seen as industry experts and build on their SEO. At the time, my manager tasked me with the job of getting a list of backup experts for the content which would go into the blog. That’s what I did and I was pretty proud of the results.

After hours of hard work, we finally got to the stage where the developers were putting the pages together for the blog and the content was being written. Unfortunately, it had taken longer than expected and the expert we were planning to use for our content had in the meantime worked for one of our competitors, therefore making them unusable to us.

Thankfully, my earlier efforts meant we already had the list of backup experts and one I had found was perfect!

While the expert I had found was used, I only found out we had used them via a conversation I overheard in the kitchen. My work had helped the business out in a time of need, but my manager didn’t give me any recognition for it or even acknowledge that the work had helped.

Now some of you may hear this and think: “Well you were getting paid for that? What’s the issue?”.

I was a trainee, so for me receiving recognition was vital in terms of recognising my own development. How was I supposed to know how I was doing well if no one told me?

It was doubly important since my work had managed to save the organisation quite a bit of money. They were right in the middle of the development stage, so they were having to pay developers to build these web pages for the blog, anything that would have hindered the development of the pages which would ultimately have meant that the business would have had to pay out a lot more in web development costs.

I would often hear other people being recognised on a daily basis, so from this point forward I felt a lot less motivated; I felt like my work was pointless. I wasn’t getting any recognition for any of the effort I was putting in. And I wasn’t alone. A recent KPMG survey asked people for one reason they would leave their current role. The top response was: not feeling their contribution is appreciated (58 percent).

It’s so easy to keep your people motivated

Making sure you give your employees recognition is one of the most important roles as a  manager. Without it, you could be encouraging your people to leave a job they might otherwise love; which will cost you thousands in hiring costs, increased salaries for new hires and lower productivity. At the end of the day, it doesn’t take a lot to show your people you appreciate them.

Not giving recognition where it’s due is a common symptom of accidental management, if you’d like to find out how you can eradicate accidental management within your organisation, feel free to join us at one of our monthly Time to Lead tasters.

https://diarydetox.com#taster