The Importance of Both Recognizing AND Valuing Employees at Work

Recognize This! – Having your work recognized and knowing the value of your contribution are two very different sides of the same coin.

The best practices around employee recognition and reward that I teach so closely intertwine recognizing and valuing employees, this article on research out of Kenexa brought me up short.

I was tracking along, nodding my head in agreement with this part of the research:

“Kenexa research found that the survey item ‘I receive recognition when I do good work’ has a norm score (across industries and countries) of 55 per cent favourable. That is, on average more than half of employees feel they are recognised when they do a good job. Contrastingly, the survey item ‘I feel valued as an employee of this company’ only has a 41 per cent favourable response, with 32 per cent actually indicating an unfavourable response. This shows that on average less than half of employees feel valued and one third actually believe they are not valued.”

Yes, our own research supports much the same findings with both recognition and “I feel valued” scores tracking terribly low. And then the article skewed in a way that made me sit back and think, “Perhaps what has been obvious to me for so long is not obvious to everyone.”

“These findings indicate that there is clearly a difference between recognising and valuing an employee. Recognition is typically tied to what we do – not who we are, while valuing is about acknowledging someone not merely for tasks, but for the deeper intrinsic worth they add to an organisation by just being there.”

Again, yes, I agree with these basic definitions. Yet to me, the very purpose of recognition – indeed, why we call it strategic, social recognition– lies in helping employees understand how valued they and their efforts are by their peers, their manager and the organization as a whole.

Bottom line: If you are not putting “valuing your employees” as a core element of your recognition program, you have failed to truly recognize employees. That’s why traditional “recognition” programs like perfect attendance that I wrote about yesterday are miserable “recognition” programs.

Do your employees feel valued in your organization, as well as recognized? Do you?

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