Praise and horizontal culture
By Kim Jong-nam
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I had a recent workshop with the managers of one of the largest companies in Korea on the subject of praise and recognition culture. The managers said they already knew why praise is necessary in their organization: praise helps motivation, boosts performance achievement, and creates happy employees, which leads to a workplace that is stable and allows employees to explore their potential. It lowers stress, turn-over rates, and unnecessary conflicts.
Disney Company is well-known for implementing a praise and recognition program in which managers complimented their employees every day; this program resulted in a 15 percent increase in employee satisfaction. Similarly, according to the research done by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, 94.4 percent of high-morale employees out of 200,000 people surveyed over a period of 10 years said their managers were good at praising and recognizing their employees. Indeed, many studies have shown that praise results in higher productivity and a healthier culture, including a 2004 Gallup survey of 4 million people. The responses to the Gallup survey affirmed the benefits above, as well as some additional ones. Praising employees led to better relations with customers―given that happier people tend to be kinder―and thereby increased customer loyalty. Employees who received praise even had better health. If all of these things are true, praise cultures should be mandatory for organizations.
When designing this workshop, the training manager of the client company and I were concerned that the managers attending the workshop would feel awkward when practicing praise, and think that it was unrealistic to try to apply praise in the workplace, because habitual praising itself seems unnatural. We also wondered whether the managers knew who, when, and how to praise, and finally how to create a praise and recognition culture. Since this workshop was held as a direct result of a companywide survey, we were confident about its necessity.
At the beginning of the workshop, we asked the participants to discuss what praise was actually like in their workplace. Since these attendees had, on average, more than 10 or 20 years of experience as managers, their opinions were an accurate reflection of their corporate culture. On the whole, they agreed, there had been little to no praise in their workplace. We then asked them how often they personally had been praised and recognized, how their morale had been boosted, and what was stopping them from creating a praise culture.
Here is a summary of their responses:
1. The managers said that they could not provide enough praise to their employees because they did not have enough time. If you feel like you barely have enough time to get your own work done, taking time out of your day to praise your employees might feel like an unnecessary luxury. Thus, criticism was far more common than praise, as it was seen as being more necessary.
2. Sadly, the managers also said that they themselves were never praised or recognized. This means that they are actually unfamiliar with how to praise and how to be praised. As they do not know what it feels like to be praised, they cannot understand the positive impact that praise and recognition would bring.
3. Even worse, many of the mangers felt that their organizational culture implicitly devalued praise. There were four points made by their responses that supported this conclusion. (1) Their performance management system focuses on finding the flaws and shortcomings of their employees. (2) It is naturally taken for granted in their organization that it is the responsibility of supervisors and managers to find these flaws. However, praise is not a part of this responsibility. (3) It is assumed in the office that employees and managers should be polite to their superiors; however, it is acceptable for them to be harsh and cold with their subordinates. Moreover, in the culture of their workplace, managers are in the habit of commanding with unilateral directives. (4) A lack of accountability allowed managers to blame subordinates instead of taking responsibility themselves. This creates the organizational assumption that the subordinates are objects to be blamed, not praised.
These responses, among many others, helped clarify why they were not motivating and encouraging their employees using praise and positive feedback. Notice that these answers were not personal. Rather, the issues stemmed from structural and cultural problems of the organization as a whole. Thus, the culture was to blame, rather than specific managers who do not praise their employees.
We do not need to try to find additional materials to prove that praise and recognition are beneficial to corporations. What is most important is how create the correct system. It is relatively easy to teach praise and recognition skills in isolation; however, it is much harder to fix an organization’s deep-rooted culture. Thus, organizations should make an effort to change their rigid top-down cultures simultaneously with teaching praise skills to their managers. Praise, then, is not just a tool in and of itself: it can be a bridge to a horizontal culture that fully utilizes the strengths and competencies of its employees. Therefore, this is one of the key concepts that Korean companies should focus on in order to be more globally competitive.
Kim Jong-nam is the founding CEO of META (www.imeta.co.kr) and the author of the book "Organizations without Meetings."