It turns out that praise and recognition are really very important for employees to feel happy in their workplace. They feel they have been acknowledged as an individual and they are not just a number.

Often, the culture that prevails is one of: “If you don’t hear anything you are doing a good job”. How would people know that they are performing adequately and how would they know what is important? How do people feel when they think they are being ignored? Lack of praise causes people to feel ignored.

Performance will start to drop and employees won’t care very much about their role and whether they are performing it well or not. I would go so far as to say that it is literally “soul destroying” when somebody is being continually ignored.

Polls have found that workers also value praise from co-workers very highly, they think it is great when somebody is recognizing that they have done a great job. Praise from peers has become as important of praise from “above”.

So has praise in the workplace really diminished or was it never there in the first place? Has the lack of it become more important because people lack social interaction? Or because technology has taken over and workers have less face to face contact?

The cyberworld certainly is not a “warm, fuzzy” place. My computer doesn’t praise me when I have finally worked out how to do something….I think I need to put some little audio snippets and pretty pictures there that randomly churn out some praise for me!

Till next time

Connie and Charly

from

http://www.stretchyourmindandbody.com