Everyone loves getting paid, right? Contrary to what some business owners or senior leadership may think, employees aren’t actually entirely doing their jobs purely for the love of it, and that regular deposit in the bank account is the key to a host of life’s essentials. You know, things such as housing, food, and utility bills.
What we also need from our work is recognition, validation, and feedback. We want to feel engaged at work, appreciated by our managers and wider teams. Regular feedback is great, we all want and need it to do our jobs well and accelerate our performance. No one works well in a void. But during the pandemic, many workers felt that their engagement slipped due to remote working and the understandable priority shifts many businesses faced in order to cope with a sudden, and unprecedented situation.
Employee engagement is a key metric for businesses because it increases productivity in the workplace – overall, companies with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable and when engagement is high, workplaces see 41% less absenteeism.
It makes sense – when you feel appreciated and understood, you’ll work harder and engage more with the tasks and projects you’re assigned. But depending on your age and seniority in the workplace, you’re likely to require different levels of feedback to make you feel engaged.
A recent study from Gallup and Workhuman discovered that only 26% of employees strongly agree that they receive similar amounts of recognition as other team members with similar performance levels. However, just 10% of Generation Z employees strongly agree that recognition is a pillar of their workplace culture and 40% of this demographic would like recognition from their manager at least a “few times a week”, but only about 25% are actually getting recognition at that frequency.
Older workers are twice as likely to agree that recognition is a pillar of their workplace culture than Generation Z, and people managers…