I used to think I was good at recognizing my team. I said "great job" in standups. I called people out by name in front of the whole company at all-hands. I figured it was enough.
It didn't cover it. Not close.
The Moment It Broke
A few years back, I had an engineer, quiet, sharp, the kind who fixed the ugliest bugs without ever asking for a spotlight. I did what I always did: I praised her in the next team meeting, in front of everyone.
She came to me afterward. Not angry. Tired. She said something like, "I'd rather you told me quietly. It felt like a performance review, not a thank you."
I'd been giving appreciation my whole career, in exactly one language. Hers wasn't the same one. Neither, it turned out, were half the people on my team.
Recognition Isn't One-Size-Fits-All
There's a book, The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace by Gary Chapman and Paul White, and it names what I stumbled into the hard way. People don't all receive appreciation the same way. Some want words, said out loud, to their face. Some want it public. Some want it private. Some don't want words at all, they want you to notice the extra hours and give them something tangible: time off, a task lifted off their plate, help.
I was running one language, loud and proud, on a team fluent in five.
Here's why it matters more than a warm feeling. 79% of employees who quit their jobs cite lack of appreciation as their primary reason for leaving, per O.C. Tanner's research. Organizations with strong recognition practices see 31% lower voluntary turnover, per Bersin by Deloitte. Employees who don't feel adequately recognized are twice as likely to say they'll quit within the year.
I read these numbers now and think about my engineer. She didn't resign over one awkward all-hands shoutout. I know how easily things would have gone the other way if I'd kept repeating it, meeting after meeting, to someone experiencing it as pressure instead of praise.
Why I Defaulted to Public Praise
Here's the uncomfortable part. I didn't praise people publicly because I'd thought carefully about what they needed. I did it because it was easy, and because it made me look good. Public recognition doubles as a leadership performance. Everyone in the room sees the leader who "notices things." One sentence, one meeting, credit handed to three people at once.
Workhuman's research found 85% of employees prefer some form of public recognition, and I leaned on this stat as cover for years. Averages hide people, though. This 15% isn't a rounding error. It's the engineer who fixes your ugliest bugs and dreads the meeting where you thank her for it.
I never asked my team how they wanted to be thanked. I assumed my style was everyone's style. It wasn't laziness exactly, more a failure of imagination. I couldn't picture appreciation working any other way than the way it worked on me, because I'm loud, and public praise has always landed fine on me.
The Five Ways People Want to Be Thanked
Once I went looking, the research backed up what my engineer had told me directly. Chapman and White surveyed over 100,000 workers and found people cluster into five distinct preferences, according to research summarized by Niagara Institute:
- Words of affirmation (45% pick this as their top preference): a specific, spoken acknowledgment of what someone did well.
- Quality time: your undivided attention, a conversation where you're listening rather than waiting to talk.
- Acts of service (22% primary, another 15% secondary): help with the workload itself. Taking something off someone's plate reads as gratitude louder than any speech.
- Tangible gifts (only 6% primary, and the least valued language 70% of the time): a small physical marker showing you were paying attention.
- Appropriate physical touch: a handshake, a fist bump, in the right workplace context.
Notice what's missing from this list: volume. Nowhere does it say "in front of as many people as possible." This was my invention, not the research's.
What I Changed
After the conversation with my engineer, I did something simple. I asked. Not a survey, not a form, a direct question in one-on-ones: "When you do something well, how do you want me to acknowledge it?"
The answers surprised me. One person wanted a two-line email, sent the same day, cc'd to nobody. Another wanted me to protect an afternoon for deep work as the thank you, no words needed. One person genuinely wanted the public shoutout, the bigger the room the better. My engineer wanted a quiet word, the two of us, before she went home.
None of this took more effort than what I was already doing. It took attention. I had to remember which language went with which person, the same way you'd remember someone takes their coffee black. This is the whole fix.
I started asking this question in every onboarding conversation now, right alongside the standard stuff about working hours and tools access. "How do you want to be recognized when you do good work?" gets written down next to someone's timezone and their preferred communication channel. It goes stale if you never revisit it, so I ask again around the six-month mark, since people's preferences shift as they settle into a role or move into a new one. A quiet junior engineer who dreaded the spotlight in year one sometimes wants the spotlight by year three, once she trusts the room.
Why This Sticks With Me
I build feedback tools for a living now, and I think about this conversation more than any customer interview I've run. The gap isn't a lack of caring. Most managers want to appreciate their people. The gap is this: managers, like I did, assume their own preference is universal, then wonder why recognition programs feel hollow to half the team.
A good feedback culture doesn't hand every employee the same trophy. It asks each person what lands for them, then delivers it, consistently, without needing a quarterly survey to remind you. This is part of why I built the Behavioural Awareness Tool at StepUp2Bat the way I did: leadership evaluation only means something if it captures how specific people experience your behavior, not an average across the whole team. Appreciation works the same way. The averages tell you what to expect from a crowd. They tell you nothing about the one person in the room who needs something different from what everyone else does.
Your Turn
If you lead people, you're already giving appreciation in some form. The question worth sitting with is whether you're giving it in your language or theirs.
Ask one person this week how they want to be thanked when they do good work. Then do it their way, not yours. It costs you nothing, and it might be the difference between someone staying five more years or updating their resume tonight.
What's your appreciation style, and does it match how you thank the people who work for you?