Why is nobody feeling recognised?

The overwhelming majority of employees that participated in a survey by REBORRN believe that they are not recognised by leadership often enough for their achievements. Here’s why this may be the case.

It’s not necessarily that leadership doesn’t talk about the challenges employees may have with it.

In most C-level meetings you will often hear concerns about attracting top-tier talent, problems in nailing the right flexibility in working arrangements, second-thoughts about leadership strategies, difficulties in people management.

The problem is that this conversation is rarely a two-way stream. If you ask twice, beyond the chatter, corporate leadership will frequently have no idea what the actual challenges employees are facing with it truly are, or how they compare to other organisations locally and globally.

This information gap was exactly what drove us to run a survey across different countries -the UK, Greece and South Korea- giving employees themselves the chance to identify the challenges they face with their leadership, and to rate their frequency and importance. 

Over 800 participants selected the pain-points they face from the leadership in their organisations, choosing from a list of 30 options that touched upon everything from alignment to culture and from feedback to innovation.

The results surprised us in many ways. One of them was the sheer variety of options. When we segregated the data based on the different variables, such as the different countries, industries, or years of experiences, slightly different pictures of challenges and prioritisations emerged. Turns out, the challenges employees face with their leadership are themselves quite diverse. You can play around with the dynamic table of the data and you’ll see for yourselves.

But there was another, even more surprising result. Despite the variety, it seems that almost everyone, everywhere, all at once, is feeling that they are not recognised often enough for their achievements.

There is no doubt that lack of recognition emerged as the biggest challenge employees face with their leadership, whichever way you look at the results of our survey. 

• 🥇It was the number one pain point in the total sample, with an overwhelming 62% of participants selecting it as a challenge they face from their management. 

• 🔁It also came first in terms of frequency rate. From the employees who said they experience it, almost half (46%) picked it as one of the five most commonly occurring problems in their organisation.

• 📢It also tied for first place in terms of importance scoring a 3.71/4 in the importance scale.

The visual comparison with the other 30 challenges listed in the survey is illuminating: in the scatterplot combining both frequency and importance, recognition is the only option occupying the top right quartile of the graph. In other words, lack of recognition for employee’s achievements is the only challenge that appears both incredibly frequently and in a way that is incredibly important to employees.

What is more, lack of recognition was also the “king” of employee challenges across almost all data segmentations by different variables - albeit with some interesting variations and observations that shed more light into the problem. 

• 🌍It was overwhelmingly the most common challenge in Greece, where more than two thirds of the participants (72,5%) selected it. However it also came in the top 5 of pain points both in the UK (3rd, 56,5% of respondents) and in South Korea (4th, 56% of respondents), suggesting that it is a problem that transcends borders. 

• 🚺It was a challenge identified by both genders, though women ranked this issue as slightly more frequent (W=53%, M=37.5%) and more important (W=3.73/4, M=3.68/4) than men. 

• 💼Unsurprisingly, it also was a challenge more frequently selected by participants in junior, middle and specialist positions -where it placed at the top of the challenges pyramid- compared to senior management positions, where it didn’t get the first spot but it still made the top 5 of pain points identified by participants.

What is more surprising is that the need for recognition is a well-documented, intrinsic part of human nature that is known to empower performance and motivation. Companies have been trying to excel at creating recognition and rewards programs for decades, and most HR departments have already put tools and mechanisms in place to make sure their employees' hard work is openly appreciated and valued. 

But as recent market research suggested, while a staggering 94% of organisations have some form of recognition program in place, only 31% rate their program’s effectiveness as “high” or “very high.

So despite several recognition programs and established conventional wisdoms, why is it that almost nobody is feeling recognised often enough for their achievements?

Compounding problems: the challenges most correlated with recognition

To get a better sense of why employees do not feel recognised from their management, a useful tool might be to dig deeper into the correlations between the different challenge options presented in our survey. 

Our research was by no means aiming to establish causation. Think of it rather as a “springboard”, from which whoever is interested could dive into the different challenges faced by employees today and their intersections, and seek answers tailored to the nuances of their organisation and team.

The idea is that by identifying the other common pain points selected by those who feel unrecognised, we can shed light into the wider context that makes employees seek more recognition, while also highlighting some general overarching problems that leadership may be facing. 

In order to initiate more meaningful conversations, we also reached out to several employees. We heard their uncensored thoughts on existing recognition patterns in their workplaces and we interjected them with the relevant correlation results.

Below are four other challenges with leadership that were most strongly correlated with a lack of recognition in our survey:

• 🎙️Only the most vocal individuals are heard (correlation: 0.37) : Could it be that introverts feel a lack of recognition more often than their more outspoken colleagues, or that verbal recognition comes more frequently to those who demand more attention in a meeting? Whichever the true causal link is, the dominance of extroverted employees, which is one of the most common culture problems for leadership to address, presents a strong correlation with the feeling of not being recognised often enough for one’s achievements. A junior level employee from the UK, working in a large retail company, gave an interesting spin to this when she shared her experiences with us. “One of the biggest pet peeves I have with our management is that it will end up listening to or rewarding ideas coming from the most confident and loud employees in the office, even when the exact same ideas have been pointed out earlier by others who are more soft-spoken”, she says. “It makes some of us feel invisible because we never get our flowers, for the same contributions that others are constantly celebrated for”. Turns out that large parts of an organisation may end up feeling unrecognised if leadership is not mindful of verbally recognizing the ideas of all employees - vocal or timid. 

• 🧐The rationale for decisions is not always clear (correlation: 0.39): Another challenge strongly correlated with lack of recognition was the feeling that management does not adequately explain the rationale behind its decision making. The confluence of the two challenges may suggest a wider problem with a leadership’s capability to communicate clearly and provide direction to its employees: whether for strategy or feedback, sometimes companies are just really bad at explaining why they do what they do. But there is also another possibility here: even when positive feedback and public recognition exist within a company, if they don’t happen with a transparent rationale or with clear standards and guidelines, employees might interpret them as favouritism. “I think the key here is not being recognised “often enough””, told us a Greek employee who works in middle management for a pharmaceutical company. “ For example, sometimes the same people’s names get mentioned all the time, even in milestones where they didn’t necessarily contribute the most. This can create a climate of unfairness, or an expectation for recognition that is very difficult to maintain across the board of an entire company”.

• 🔇There is a lack of honesty and straightforward feedback (correlation: 0.39): Along the same lines, it should come as no surprise that a lot of employees who do not feel recognised enough also reported that there is a lack of honesty and straightforward feedback from their organisation’s leadership. This may indicate a common origin behind the two challenges from leadership, namely difficulty in giving feedback to employees that feels clear and truthful. There may also be another interesting observation here revealed about the pitfalls of recognition programs: could it be that they are seen as performative and insincere when they are pursued infrequently or superficially? A Greek employee working in a software company certainly thinks frequency and timing matters a lot, telling REBORRN that “though our management openly recognises the efforts of employees in many ways, it often does it only at the very end of long and exhaustive projects or at the end of the year at the Christmas party, sometimes creating the impression they’re only doing it after colleagues are on the verge of burnout. To many, this can seem insincere”.

• 🥱People don’t think that their work is meaningful (correlation: 0.40): The most closely correlated challenge with lack of recognition was also one that begs the eternal causation dilemma of the chicken or the egg. A considerable number of people who don’t feel recognised enough also said that they struggle to find meaning in their work. Could this be because recognition is so important and inherent to the employee experience that its absence makes work meaningless? Could it be that a lack of meaningfulness in someone’s project pipeline makes them more eager to at least receive their manager’s recognition for their efforts? Whatever the relationship is, it is clear that recognition and meaningfulness are closely correlated and both rank very high on employee’s priorities. “Sometimes we go the extra mile, under a lot of pressure, precisely because we want to please our colleagues or managers who we look up to”. says the UK junior employee previously mentioned. “I understand it is difficult for them to do when we’re really busy, but when they don’t recognise this it can leave a feeling of emptiness”.

But are we all talking about the same thing?

As is the case with almost all feelings that are universal, recognition is a need we all have, but which can have different forms for each and every one of us. The results of our survey prompt us to wonder whether there is actually a semantic difference in the way leadership, HR and employees look at recognition. Could it be that we are talking about two different things?  Do employees and leadership actually define recognition in different ways?

Once again we turned to several employees, asking them what they actually mean by recognition and how it appears (or not) in their workplace, and we received a variety of different answers. Here are some of their testimonials:

“The alpha and the omega of recognition for me is monetary, whether in the form of bonuses or promotions”. [34-year-old, Greece, technology industry]

“I much prefer being recognised privately or in written form by my manager, rather than at a full house company meeting“. [32-year-old, South Korea, media industry]

“It’s more about the attention behind the recognition for me. When my manager mentions specific things I’ve done well without me having to point them out, it shows they’re really paying attention." [27-year-old, UK, retail industry]

“I think of recognition as consistency in acknowledging hard work. It’s not just about the big achievements but the everyday efforts that we put in. Of course, compensation is part of it as well”. [45-year-old, Greece, consulting industry]

“Recognition for me is also about showing trust, not just about congratulating me after you have micromanaged every step of my work”. [33-year-old, UK, utilities industry]

Their responses seem to confirm our hypothesis that there could actually be a difference in how different parties approach recognition, and particularly HR. Conventional HR practices see recognition as strictly non-monetary, separate from the concept of reward which includes financial incentives such as bonuses. But our testimonials indicate that several employees believe recognition is something that should also have a price tag, elsewhere it risks being all show and no substance. 

This may be further explained by the overwhelming dominance of this challenge in the Greek market, where admittedly salaries are significantly lower compared to the other two markets we examined in the survey as well as most EU countries, even when costs of living are factored in.

Additionally, the testimonials seem to point in many directions, but not what HR often does when it thinks recognition is low, which is essentially creating a kudos program. Virtual pats on the back or awards for employee of the month may mean nothing if recognition is not done in a consistent or transparent way, or if more foundational employee needs aren’t covered.

An HR officer from the UK put it best when discussing the reason why many recognition tools can make employees feel even more alienated when they are simply used as an afterthought or when employees do not feel adequately compensated to begin with.

It’s kind of like Maslow's pyramid of needs applied to the workforce. If the basics such as a competitive salary or a pleasant workplace environment aren’t present, whatever recognition initiatives there are can just fall on deaf ears.

There is also another dimension of semantics clear from the testimonials: not everybody perceives recognition the same way, and a specific form of recognition or reward may not have the same impact on an employee’s motivation or performance as it does on another. 

Even though there is an almost universal need for more recognition in the workplace, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a one-size-fits-all recognition program is going to address the needs of all employees. Some respond better to public accolades and some to personal acknowledgments, some to monetary rewards and some to more creative perks.

The diverse definitions indicate that if an organisation really wants to nail recognition for all employees, it probably needs to talk to people more openly, to give more frequent feedback but also to understand what form of recognition actually motivates them. Of course, things like anonymized employee surveys can be a good step in unearthing some information about how people feel they need to be recognised. But both the survey and the testimonials seem to suggest a need for recognition to be timely, consistent and earnest, and this is something much better achieved in regular one-on-one meetings with management that make sure conversation has a two way flow.

It may be difficult or awkward to talk about recognition openly, but it does seem that there is a need for it - and once you do it, make sure to also give yourself a pat on the back.

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Thank you for reading our latest Uncensored piece, the first one of our Decoding Leadership Challenges series. In case you missed our report, click here to download it or explore the open-source data in a dynamic table, and make sure to join us again for our next article where we will be discussing Gen Z and its strategic concerns with leadership.