World Gratitude Day is a wonderful time to show gratitude to your colleagues and the people you work ... [+]
September 21 is World Gratitude Day. Don’t let it slip by without noticing it. Take five minutes as you read this column to think about how gratitude and recognition can change a person’s perspective about work – including yours. World Gratitude Day is a moment to kick off (or reinforce) the message that the organization is also a community, and thus it is a place where values are practiced every day.
The people who founded World Gratitude Day note that expressing gratitude is just as important as feeling grateful. When you express aloud a feeling like gratitude (or love, or respect) you affirm its importance. Something shifts inside your mind that makes it more real. And when you express gratitude to a specific person by recognizing them for something they did, you create a connection that didn’t exist before.
Gratitude has emotional rewards. Gratitude has physical benefits like improved sleep and immunity. Gratitude is a two-way street: It changes both the giver and the receiver. The famous management thinker Willy Nelson said, “When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.” It’s a simple and profound formulation: bring gratitude into your organization, and your whole culture turns around – for the better.
Is work a place for gratitude?
Do you hear a voice in the back of your mind saying, “Yeah but…gratitude is too personal/sentimental/awkward to express at work?” Ask yourself where that voice is coming from. It’s probably an outdated idea of what the workplace is.
The age-old model of work as a pure transaction between employer and employee – performance for money – is falling to new, dynamic models brought about by technology, social change, and a growing movement that sees business as more than a means to enrich a few owners. The pandemic demonstrated that for many people work is their close-knit community of trusted relationships, partnerships, friendships, and shared values. I call it the Human Workplace, and it embodies a new school of management thinking from luminaries like Adam Grant, Brené Brown, Kim Scott, Simon Sinek, and Dov Seidman.
Lately we’ve seen a lot of coverage of “quiet quitting,” which is really just a new term for lack of engagement on the part of employees. Disenchantment with work likewise drove the Great Resignation. People become disengaged when they don’t have a psychological stake in their work: they might show up for a paycheck but they don’t feel attached to the organization in a meaningful way. It follows that re-engaging employees changes that attitude. The most powerful management practice to engage employees is recognizing their contributions and thanking them.
In fact, resistance to openly expressing gratitude is one reason recognition at work has such power. In economics, scarcity makes something more valuable. But sincere appreciation gains value as it becomes abundant. Perhaps that has to do with the scarcity of gratitude and thanks in the rest of our daily lives. People at work are culturally starved for both giving and receiving gratitude.
Recognition’s role
The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Just pausing in the endless distractions and obligations of the workday to recognize the contribution of a colleague, to note what they are doing and thank them, is itself an act of generosity. When the thanks is made public throughout the enterprise, that act of gratitude creates a psychological lift to anyone who sees it.
Imagine gratitude becoming part of the daily routine for everyone in the organization. Quickly, a rising tide of appreciation and thanks changes the quality of the workday for individuals. Over time, the culture turns toward positivity, communication, and trust. An enterprise-scale employee recognition system amplifies the one-to-one attention that individuals express. When everyone can see peers elevated, receiving attention and praise, the positive effect becomes a cultural attribute that lives in your organization, building energy and engagement.
As a leader, the legacy of your working life should be more than “success” as measured by material gain or shareholder value. We are all connected in a web of interdependency. Showing gratitude for the things that come to you from others is a natural way to honor and strengthen that web.
