Managers often believe they show appreciation, but many employees don't feel recognized.

Recognition fails when it is expressed but not experienced by employees in meaningful ways.

Feeling valued at work is linked to lower burnout and higher motivation and well-being.

Personalized, specific gratitude is more effective than general or generic praise.

Most managers believe they show appreciation at work.

Most employees disagree.

I learned this firsthand on my 10-year work anniversary.

At my workplace, they start celebrating employment milestones at 10 years, and every five years thereafter. They have an appreciation lunch and you get to pick a gift from a catalog of corporate swag (e.g., a hat or a reusable lunch bag). Even though I knew these gifts were nothing special, I looked forward with eager anticipation to my 10-year mark when I would be invited to my first appreciation luncheon.

The only problem is my workplace went through significant financial hardship during my 9th year of employment. They cut jobs, denied raises, and cut out all extras, including the appreciation lunch and milestone gifts.

As my 10-year work anniversary date approached, I knew there would be no lunch or gift. But even so…. I kept thinking I’d at least receive an email. Something small. A quick acknowledgement.

That said, my department has an annual retreat and at the first retreat after my 10-year work anniversary, one of our department administrators had gift bags put together for all the employment milestones. It was simple enough — a branded reusable carrying tote and branded tumbler — but the gesture meant so much, especially in light of the fact that gifts (and even acknowledgement, apparently) had been eliminated at a higher level.

This is unfortunate because, here’s the thing… gratitude matters. Moments like this are easy to dismiss, especially in organizations still recovering from budget cuts, restructuring, or doing more with less.

But they point to something bigger happening in today’s workplace. It’s not whether leaders express gratitude — it’s whether employees actually feel it.

The Gratitude Gap: Leaders Think They Express It More Than Employees Experience It

Research shows that employee recognition is a blind spot for employers. Nearly 60% of managers say they recognize employees for good work, but just over a third of employees say they receive recognition. In other words, appreciation isn’t landing the way leaders think it is.

This leads to a mismatch between employer behavior and employee experiences. Managers feel like they regularly express gratitude to employees, while most employees do not feel appreciated in the workplace.

Gratitude as an Antidote to Burnout

Gratitude is beneficial in so many ways. In the workplace, supervisor support is linked to lower burnout and higher well-being.

Additionally, burnout often stems from overwork, exhaustion, and loss of a meaningful sense of accomplishment. Gratitude targets the “meaning” component — recognizing employees for their good work.

While work-life balance is an extremely important part of the burnout equation, so is the ability to help employees feel recognized and valued for their contributions. Studies have shown that gratitude positively affects employee motivation and happiness. Additionally, a practice of providing intentional, consistent gratitude across time is associated with substantially improved job satisfaction (up nearly 18%), with longer-term implications for improved retention rates.

Expressing Gratitude in the Workplace

The way that managers express gratitude matters because, again, it’s not whether they express it, but whether employees actually feel it. In studies of various types of gratitude (e.g., verbal, electronic, handwritten, monetary, etc.), most employees would prefer verbal gratitude expressed one-on-one. But sincerity and authenticity matters, too. General praise to the team as a whole is not perceived as favorably as individual recognition. And employees indicated that generic gratitude was not as effective as gratitude that was highly personalized and specific.

While the majority would like a verbal expression of gratitude, individual preferences can vary by person. Importantly, only 12% of employees say they have been asked about how they would like to be recognized. It may be that some value public praise, while for others, public praise may be a source of embarrassment, and they would far prefer individual praise.

Employers should ask employees about their preferences and, no matter what they think they are doing currently, they probably need to do more. If they do, everyone wins — the employee and the organization. Through improved motivation and job satisfaction, the organization saves money with increased output and less turnover. And the employee “wins” because feeling valued at work improves happiness overall. Work stress spills over into private life, so making work life better has positive benefits for personal life outside the workplace, too.

That small tote bag and tumbler from my department administrator didn’t matter because of what they were. They mattered because, in a moment when the organization had stopped recognizing people, someone chose to notice anyway. That’s the difference.

Employees don’t need grand gestures. But they do need to feel seen. And more often than not, that’s the part leaders are missing.

Patil, M., Biswas, S., & Kaur, R. (2018). Does gratitude impact employee morale in the workplace. Journal of Applied Management – Jidnyasa, 10(2), 21–36. http://simsjam.net/index.php/Jidnyasa/article/view/141242

Stegen, A., & Wankier, J. (2018). Generating gratitude in the workplace to improve faculty job satisfaction. Journal of Nursing Education, 57(6), 375–378. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29863740/

Jordan, A. C. (2025, February 17). Burnout nearly broke me – Don’t make the same mistake. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/leading-with-connection/202502/burnout-nearly-broke-me-dont-make-the-same-mistake

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