Perceiving Ourselves and Others in Organizations
Being valued in any workplace is very important in order to keep employees happy and
leaders satisfied. To me, the statistics that show only 17% of North American employees polled
believe their company’s culture strongly supports employee recognition (McShane) and that 73%
of North American managers say their company has recognition programs (McShane) does not
match up. Many leaders feel their company is doing a good job with recognition, but their
employees do not agree. With the many jobs I’ve worked with in the past, my leaders were very
good at recognition. For example, when I worked construction and team did a great job; our boss
would take us out and buy us all lunch. To me, it made me happier as a worker because I felt
appreciated. Another example of recognition that I’ve received in the past is a pay raise. My boss
called me into his office to tell me how great of a job I was doing and told me I deserved a pay
raise. This also was a great form of recognition for me because I felt like I earned it. All of the
employees who were working hard and doing a great job received a pay raise also. It definitely
helped the culture of work because all of my co-workers felt appreciated and started to work
even harder. It also caused people to actually want to be there and complaints declined.
If I were the leader in charge, there would be a strong recognition program available for
all of the employees. Specifically, I would use tactics like my former bosses have used because I
know it worked. Therefore, I would be taking my workers out to lunch and pay for it when they
performed in an elite way. Also, I would be giving pay raises for those that deserved it in a
certain time span. The time span would cause the workers to work very hard throughout the
whole span because they would know about the pay raise.
The first fact I found is “The company behind the real-world treasure hunt app, Geocaching
knows how to treat it’s employees like treasures too. HR Manager, Laura Hughes explains how
they do staff appreciation: Encourage managers to ask employees how they most like to be
next decade.” (http://www.rrgexec.com/rewarding-your-employees-15-examples-of-successful-
incentives-in-the-corporate-world/)