But my friend had a point. Once you earn enough to meet what you deem to be basic needs, you are more inclined to value non-remunerative aspects of work, such as praise and appreciation.
Put another way, people can stay in jobs that pay less than the market rate if they feel their work is regularly and properly valued.
To be more specific, if they are recognised at least monthly, they are 33 per cent more likely to say they are not job hunting in the year to come, some research shows.
Yet the share of US workers who say they have been praised or recognised in the past seven days for doing good work sank to a 15-year low this year, mirroring a slump in the percentage who say they are extremely happy with where they work.
This raises a question: Why don’t managers deploy praise more adroitly?
SERIOUSLY SIGNIFICANT
It is hard to think of anything else that costs so little, takes such a piffling amount of time, and yet achieves so much, as a short email or a brief chat to praise someone’s work.
For employees whose work is largely unseen, or only noticed when they muck up, this recognition can be seriously significant.
Pathetically, I can still remember the time when I was a news editor and a senior executive came by to marvel at how our desk had turned several illegible stories into readable reports, at speed.
This was of course our job. But it was also largely invisible, except when we inserted an error or committed some other atrocity requiring corrective action.
Still, even star employees on big salaries in high-profile jobs like to be praised. And there’s much to be said for being recognised by peers, too.
