In Praise of Praise - How can you build your workplace morale – and inspire the best from your employees?

This is a great article from Susan Adams at Forbes Magazine. Here she focuses the power of employee appreciation and mentions our very own award winning Carrot Culture Gurus, Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick.
For all your employee recognition needs please contact the Baltimore Appreciateologists at baltimore@octanner.com, or call 410-661-5668. We look forward to helping you with your recognition solutions….

Expressing appreciation can be an extremely effective way to motivate employees, yet few bosses do it. The first time a boss thanked me for my work, I felt startled and a little confused. What? Had I heard that right? She's thanking me for doing the job I'm paid to do? Who expresses gratitude in the rude, no-nonsense world of journalism?

I'd spent the first phase of my career reporting to one of the toughest bosses in New York magazines, the brilliant but explosive Steven Brill, who ran The American Lawyer the old fashioned way, with excruciatingly high standards and frequent expletives. Then in the early '90s I found myself working under Robert MacNeil, at PBS' MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. An exceedingly decorous man, MacNeil even thanked the janitors, setting an office tone where managers expressed appreciation at the end of each day. Once I got over my initial surprise, I realized I very much liked it when my senior producer thanked my team and me for giving the program our all.

Although appreciation and praise, especially when expressed specifically, inevitably make employees feel more loyal and more engaged, all too few bosses practice the art of gratitude, says Chester Elton, a motivation consultant. A recent study found that between 75% and 80% of American workers said they got little or no recognition from their managers in the last year. Together with a co-author, Adrian Gostick, Elton has written four books on using recognition and praise to boost results, most recently The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their People, Retain Talent, and Accelerate Performance.

In that book, Elton and Gostick include the results of a survey they commissioned of 200,000 American workers that demonstrates a link between bosses who recognize employees with praise, along with other signs of appreciation like holiday parties and handwritten notes, and a company's financial performance. The survey shows return on equity three times higher for companies that engage in employee appreciation. Their workers are more creative and more dedicated to the business's success, and they have a stronger bond to their company and its goals, according to the research.

For the last decade Elton has been working at Carrot Culture, the leadership and training division of a Salt Lake City company called O.C. Tanner, which started 84 years ago as a maker of employee recognition lapel pins. Now O.C. Tanner produces all sorts of employee recognition products and services for companies, including awards, trophies and gift passes. As a Carrot Culture speaker, Elton charges $20,000 per appearance.

He insists that appreciation works, especially during these recessionary times when companies have cut monetary bonuses and awards. Though it costs a company nothing, verbal praise can be as effective as a cash award, he says. Hard Rock Café, the restaurant chain, did a study on the effect of managers welcoming their shifts, thanking employees for coming in and making a few inquiries about their personal lives and families. Just a minute a day of verbal appreciation reduced employee turnover by 3%, Elton says.

Source, Susan Adams, http://www.forbes.com/