Feeling seen and appreciated is a fundamental morale booster for any employee. Too often, apparently, workers go about their jobs feeling that their contributions are unrecognized and their value to their company is fleeting. We asked employees to answer the question, “Are you typically recognized for the impact and a accomplishments you make for your current company?”
The information comes from the latest reading of an ongoing study by Comparably. Over 10,000 employees responded to the question.
Just over half of both male and female employees answered “yes” to the question. This means, conversely, that 43% of men and 44% of women feel that their accomplishments largely go unseen. At the very least, we can assume that these respondents feel that their managers do not express their appreciation convincingly or frequently enough.
When responses are broken down by the ethnicities of the respondents, we see that Asian/Pacific Islanders, Hispanic/Latinos, and African-Americans all responded “yes” more frequently than the overall average. This may combat certain ideas of Caucasians feeling more embraced by the U.S. job market, and may reflect recent corporate efforts to be more openly appreciate of workers from these ethnic groups.
The younger the worker is, the more appreciated they feel. More than 65% of Gen Z (18-25) workers answered “yes” to the question, meaning they feel appreciated by their empl0yers far above the average. This number steadily drops by age bracket until we hit workers in their 50s, about 50% of whom felt that their contributions were recognized. This may be due to our culture’s tendency to be more openly encouraging of young people, while often assuming older workers need less recognition or will benefit less from it.
This same downward trend applies to experience levels as well. 60% of entry-level employees say they feel appreciated, but only 52% of workers who have been at their jobs for 10 years (and who would seem to have more accomplishments worthy of open celebration) feel that their work contributions are known.
C-suite employees feel the most appreciated, which makes sense considering the optics of their roles as leaders. At the other end of the “feeling appreciated” scale are the “grunt” workers of the tech industry: workers in IT, Customer Support, and Operations, who rarely get to interact with customers and who have jobs that are largely never done. Because of their constant presence putting out fires, its possible those employees feel they deserve more appreciation than the average worker.
When departmental responses are broken up by gender, we see discrepancies in certain departments. Males in Communications answered “yes” (that they did feel appreciated) nearly 20% more often than female employees in that department. Male execs also said “yes” 10% more often than female execs. Female workers in Operations said “yes” 7% more than the males. In general, there does not seem to be a trend wherein male employees are more openly appreciated across-the-board, which may also reflect recent corporate attempts to celebrate employees other than the traditional white males.
Latest reading as of November 22.
