My first position during high school (1.5 yr fast food), only recieved feedback during promotions. Jumped to the Marines and recieved a mega-ton of feedback. Fastforward to now, I've been in my current technology position for a year-and-a-half and the only time I heard feedback for my work was when a promotion came. I recently took on some telecommute contract work saving a product from failure and I receieved quite a bit of positive feedback (phone have something to do with it?).

So yeah, sounds about right. I would attribute it to a lot of people in leadership positions not really having training as to the processes of actual leading people. They may know how to make a phenominal gantt chart, but most of all flounder when it comes to maintaining interpersonal relationships.

The bottom line is that you have direct influence into a persons attitude, good or bad. If you completely lash out against somebody, that will produce negative results. If you praise and talk about what you liked about something, that will be a motivational nudge. Find a good middle ground where you can provide feedback both good/bad for somebody. Feedback is hugely important otherwise the person is just lost/assuming their own way.

Even worse, many manager-types tend to be hands-off when everything is going well but are quick to seize upon failures or shortcomings as they come up. This has the unfortunate side effect of encouraging employees to keep a low profile and not pursue anything risky or innovative. As innovation goes out the window, the company stagnates.

I've had too many managers go this route, which is why I always make a point to stop by coworkers' cubicles and thank them for their help or work on different projects.

I agree. In my experience there has been far too much emphasis on the negative, whilst taking the positive for granted.

Very interesting to note that praise and recognition are better motivators than financial incentives. Obvious once you think of it, but easy to lose sight of.

One of the biggest surprises about doing a startup is that there's no one whose job it is to be impressed if you work hard. I vaguely suspect that humans weren't designed for that, which is part of why startups are so stressful.

"I vaguely suspect that humans weren't designed for that"

I agree. People are quick to praise children for advancing in life, but care little for adults doing the same. The history of humanity is worrying more about your own fight for survival rather than praising other adults for theirs.

I feel good if the card reader at the door recognizes me!

What time are YC apps due?

First thing that comes to mind reading this: this could totally be a fairly easy but popular startup

Base it on email to make it Posterous-easy. [email protected] sends an email to [email protected] and says "[email protected] did an aweosome job on her TPS reports. She rocks!" ... manager approves, praise can be redeemed for cash/products/paid vacation days ... morale goes up, retention goes up, productivity goes up. hr costs go down.

profit.

I don't think this would work too well. For me at least, praise in the form of small gifts is not that worthwhile. I would much rather get honest direct feedback in the form of a conversation than an email with a link to 20 dollars of at applebees. (I mean the giftcard would be nice but it would feel belittling without the personal interaction)

I think there's a joel spolsky article on inc.com about this, intrinsic vs. Extrinsic motivation.

Gifts aren't the end-game in my mind–sorry if I gave that impression.

I think the value is simply knowing that other people notice your work, trickling that praise up to management, and making it super-simple to submit such praise.

It would still be up to managers to look at the praise and do the right thing after.

yeah, ok.

However, if thats the case then it already is super simple to submit the praise...walk over to their desk/call them/ping them/email them...

But your super simple methods fail to further a culture of feedback. If there is a central place where all employees can see positive feedback given to each other, it encourages everyone to continue giving this short notes of encouragement/thanks which keeps morales high (hopefully).

I'm not sure if having a central repository of feedback is really what callmeed was getting at but it's what I've built with my small app so this was my line of thinking.

I've built this when I was trying to learn rails: http://www.peerlove.com

Have been meaning to do a Show HN post for awhile now.

'Love' (as we call the positive feedback) thru email which populates the webapp is a feature as well.

Needs some TLC but most of all, need to get the word out to see if there is a product here or not.

A cliche says that getting recognition at work is more about the attitude rather than the work; but in my experience it is a mix of both. If the quality of work is good and you have let people know that you know that your work is good, recognition is not going anywhere. Unless people know that you totally respect yourself, they treat you like no-one.

The original statistic was "36% of employees frequently receive recognition at work". This does not mean the remaining 64% do not receive recognition. Furthermore, both the original report (Tower Watson), and this blog (Rypple), are incentivized to report the sicknesses of the workplace, as they happily sell the cures.

I think 64% is a low number and a lot of people imagine that vague assurances are actually recognition.

I further think that this leads to the company not receiving feedback from it's staff except for the ultimate: quitting. So you have staff who don't want to talk about how you could make things better, who don't want to innovate, who don't rock the boat, and who then leave because you don't seem open to communication.

And in the worst example, the company then explains away their absence via a "Well, THEY didn't have the right Culture, did they?"

I think this statistic is neither surprising nor problematic. Would you really expect more than 36% of the workforce to be frequently deserving of recognition? The job of management is not to give lip-service praise to all their employees.

I disagree -- if an employee is providing an indispensable contribution to the company, you need to be recognizing and praising them, or sooner or later they are going to stop contributing at a high level or jump to another opportunity.

And if an employee isn't providing an indispensable contribution, why are you still employing them? If 64% of your workforce isn't providing any value worth recognizing, your workforce is far too large.

Personally, I'm surprised that the 64% number is so low.

My calling, system administration, is definitely one where, the better I do my job, the less visible my work is, but it's easy to forget this is not the case for everyone else.

Isn't this basically the "grade students to produce a bell curve" vs "if a students produces A quality work, they get an A" argument?

How much you want to bet that on average, 36% of the employees for any given company is engaged in new business/sales/pre-sales?

This article received (10/19 9PM) 9/11 positive feedback comments (agreement/extrapolation etc).

Thats 81% - ahead of the curve!

I rarely received feedback at previous jobs.

Just had this happen yesterday. Spent the last month and a half working on http://chow.com/tv. The email that was sent out announcing the launch and the 2nd spot placement in the Google TV Spotlight gallery was "A big thanks to everyone who made this happen on such a tight schedule!" Some caveats, I didn't do the graphics design (two of our awesome designers worked on that) though I provided some early feedback and recommended a couple of changes based on actual implementation. However, I did the layout, operational code, and basically all of the testing. Not angry or anything, but getting a little name-drop would have been nice.