Victor Lipman, who writes on management for Forbes.com and Psychology Today, recently asked readers to share their thoughts on why employee recognition is such a pain point at many companies. “Not surprisingly, they responded abundantly and thoughtfully, bringing up numerous points I hadn’t considered,” he said. Here is a sampling:
“I’d like to (mention) the work of Barbara Fredrickson and her positivity ratio – that really, for flourishing, we need three positives to every one negative. The reason for this is that the negative is weightier and tends to stay with us more.”
– Lisa Sansom
“There could be a mismatch between a manager’s expectations and a subordinate’s expectations of what warrants recognition.” – Kenii
“Having been a corporate manager and engineer in my career, I feel that this problem is due to the fact that we have too many non-working managers. Most managers are tied up in meetings on a daily basis and when review time comes along, they have not been involved enough to know who is contributing what. We need less people-only managers and more hands-on project managers.”
– Anonymous
