Positive feedback is great for us. Studies have shown that getting praise and recognition makes us happier, more productive, more creative, more resilient, and less stressed, just to mention some of the effects.
But what are the most effective things to give positive feedback for?
Here are the top five things you can praise about your coworkers.
On December 15 I will be doing a full day seminar about Leading With Happiness in Cairo.
Join me and I will share the fascinating research that show why happy companies make more money and give you all my best tools for how to do it in practice.
My comedy show plays again in Copenhagen on
It’s a hilarious tour of all the weird and funny facts you need to know about Denmark.
Learn everything about Denmark in ten easy lessons, including how to eat like a Dane, drink like a Dane, work like a Dane, bike like a Dane, socialize like a Dane and – this is the hard one – speak like a Dane.
Studies have shown that getting praise and recognition at work makes us happier, more productive, more creative, more resilient, and less stressed, just to mention some of the effects.
But studies also show that positive feedback is much too rare in our workplaces. We did a survey that found that the third most common cause of unhappiness at work was when people feel they do a great job, but no one notices.
Here’s the good news: we can do something about it. Anyone can give anyone else positive feedback at work. You don’t have to wait for your boss to see the light and start recognizing people. You can be the one to do it, and you can make a huge difference when you do. ‘Cause make no mistake about it: a positive comment at the right time can make someone’s day. It can make someone’s entire week better.
And it really doesn’t need to be that complicated. Here are five great ways that you can praise someone else at work today.
How do you know that you’re unhappy at work? That something is not right and that it’s time to either make some changes at work or move on to a new job?
In my work, I talk to a lot of people who are not happy with their jobs. Here are the top ten symptoms of unhappiness at work that I’ve observed. How many apply to you?
Quitting a job you don’t like is a tough call, and it’s made even tougher by some very persistent myths.
These myths keep us stuck in bad jobs and give bad leaders and toxic workplaces much more power over us than they otherwise would’ve. Let’s change that.
Here are the top five myths about quitting a bad job.
There are four different kinds of motivation. Only one of them works and unfortunately, many managers focus exclusively on the other three. Kinda silly, huh?
Many people don’t feel motivated at work, and there’s a very simple explanation for this: The motivational techniques used by most managers don’t work.
In this video I show why most bosses fail to motivate staff and what actually does work.
More and more CEOs are hell-bent on forcing employees back to the office full time.
For a long time I have been really confused about why, but now a brand new study reveals the answer – and it is NOT any of the reasons they normally give like productivity or collaboration – it is something much more sinister.
There haven’t been a lot of positive outcomes from the COVID pandemic but the widespread flexibility to work from home is one. Maybe the only one.
Workers love it because they experience more flexibility, better work-life balance and higher productivity but over the last couple of years, a growing number of CEOs have been doing their best to roll it back and force everyone back into the office full time.
Well, now for the first time we have data! A fascinating new research article just gave the answer: It’s about protecting and boosting the egos of narcissistic CEOs.
In this video I go through the results of the study and how it applies in our workplaces.
This is AWESOME. A practice football field in Canada has hired two border collies to keep geese away – and they clearly LOVE their jobs!
This is AWESOME. This fifth grade teacher in North Carolina has a personalized handshake and greeting for each of his students. What a great start to the day.
While this might be a little too much for the average workplace, one thing we teach many of our clients is the value of actually saying “good morning” to your coworkers/employees in the morning.
There are several approaches to saying good morning at work:
Level 0: You ignore people completely
Level 1: A somewhat unintelligible grunt
Level 2: Saying good morning without looking at people
Level 3: Make eye contact as you say good morning
Level 4: Also say something more than just good morning, e.g. “How are you?” or something more personal.
Level 5: Also touch the other person – e.g. a handshake or a pat on the shoulder. You can even hug, but only if you and the other person want to.
Specifically, we recommend the “Level 5 Good Morning.” What you see in the video above with the teacher is probably more of a level 6 or 7 :)
It’s a small thing. It takes no time and costs no money, but it makes people happier at work – in our opinion because it reinforces good workplace relationships between coworkers and between managers and employees.
And it works. Here are two examples:
I once worked for a bank in Germany (well these are two locations in which you would not normally expect “personal affection” ;-)).
The team was large, about 40 people worked in one open space office. It surprised me a lot that every morning, whoever arrived, walked through the whole office and greeted everybody with a handshake and some personal words. It did not matter if the team members came, the bosses from higher up or anybody from another department. It was known everywhere that here you greet everybody personally.
For the first week, I found that very strange and a bit intimidating. Also, it cost a lot of time all in all. Yet afterwards, I really enjoyed it. It gave everybody the chance to get to know the colleagues a bit better, to hear what they are off to or to realize that somebody is not in or just returned from a trip or vacation. There was no need to e-mail weekly lists on who is out when. We just knew it.
Btw, when I moved on to another job, I sort of missed it.
And this one is great too:
Actually the level 5 good morning is working a treat – which is why I’ve kept it up!
I have a new team member that I supervise who sits next to me, and Mihaly also sits with us in the same section, which can be a bitdaunting for a new team member!! The three of us collaborate really well together, and I think the level 5 good morning has helped our new team member feel comfortable…
In fact, the three of us just worked on an urgent roll-out of our new website, and we had a great team dynamic – everyone knew their role, trusted one another, communicated perfectly. It was great.
I think the level 5 good morning was a big contributor to that… It’s hard to measure though isn’t it, you sort of just ’feel’ the effect. Anyway, thanks for the invaluable advice!
The opposite is also true: If someone comes into the workplace and says good morning and gets no real reaction, that can lead to people feeling isolated, ignored and lonely – which makes some people really unhappy at work.
So say “good morning” at work. It works!
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