One Small Thing Podcast: Sting in the Tail

Expressing Gratitude to Others

Think of the person who quietly holds your workplace together. They have been there for years, they never ask for credit, and they just get on with the work that keeps everyone else moving, and you would feel it within a day if they ever left. Now ask yourself when you last actually told them what they mean to the place, and if you are anything like me you meant to once or twice and never quite got to it, and there is a fair chance nobody else has told them either.

I want to say up front why this matters, because it is too important to leave until the end. Telling someone you appreciate them is one of the simplest and most overlooked things we can do to help another person feel they belong, and feeling like you belong is one of the strongest protective factors we have for our mental health and for staying well at work. It costs us nothing and it takes a single sentence, and still most of us hold back. We feel grateful all the time and we say it out loud hardly ever, because we tell ourselves we will get to it another day, and another day has a way of never arriving.

Last week on One Small Thing we opened this series on gratitude by talking about noticing what is already good, and this week we take the next step, from noticing it to saying it out loud, because saying it is where most of the good actually happens. So my invitation for the week is a simple one. Pick one person, tell them you appreciate them, and be specific about why, and trust that one honest sentence is plenty.

Saying it lands harder than we expect, for both people

We often stay quiet because we assume it will not really land, or that it will come out awkward, and the research says we are wrong on both counts. In a set of studies published in Psychological Science, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley asked people to write and send a short letter of thanks and then compared what the writers expected with what the receivers actually felt, and the writers underestimated how good their words made the other person feel, overestimated how awkward it would be, and had no real sense of how genuinely moved the other person would be (Kumar & Epley, 2018). We hold back for a version of the moment that hardly ever happens.

And when we do say it, the good does not only land on the person hearing it. In a well-known workplace study, Adam Grant and Francesca Gino found that a single thank-you left university fundraisers feeling more valued, and the ones who had been thanked went on to make noticeably more calls the following week than those who had not (Grant & Gino, 2010). Being thanked tells people their effort was seen, and people who feel seen keep showing up.

How gratitude builds relationships and spreads through a team

Saying thank you also works on the space between people, and not just on the mood of the moment. The psychologist Sara Algoe describes what she calls the find, remind and bind function of gratitude, where expressing it helps us notice good people, reminds us of their worth and draws the two of us closer together (Algoe, 2012), and this is part of how belonging actually gets built, one small acknowledgement at a time.

And it rarely stops with the two of you, because in a study of everyday kindness inside real workplaces, Jennifer Chancellor and her colleagues found that these small acts rippled outward, so that the people who received them tended to pass them on, and even the people who simply watched kindness happen felt better and behaved more generously themselves (Chancellor, Margolis, Jacobs Bao & Lyubomirsky, 2018). One person saying thank you quietly raises the odds that someone else will too, like a stone dropped in still water.

Why recognition protects people's health at work

This is the part I come back to most in my own work, because it is the part that gets misread. When organisations talk about psychosocial risk the focus usually lands on the hazards, the bullying and the crushing workload and the unclear roles and the poor support, and that is the right place to start, but the frameworks now underpinning psychosocial safety law here in Australia do not only ask what is harming people, they also ask what is protecting them, and recognition sits squarely on that second list. Safe Work Australia and the state regulators name low reward and recognition as a psychosocial hazard in its own right, right alongside role clarity and support (Safe Work Australia, 2022).

The evidence underneath that runs decades deep, and Johannes Siegrist’s effort-reward imbalance model, one of the most tested ideas in occupational health, shows that when people pour in sustained effort and get too little back, including the esteem and recognition kind of reward, their risk of stress-related illness climbs (Siegrist, 1996). Recognition is not a soft extra bolted onto the real work of safety, and it behaves like a genuine protective factor, one of the things that helps steady a person when the pressure is on.

In the research I have led on psychosocial injury prevention I see the same shape again and again, because it is rarely one dramatic event that pushes someone out of a job or out of the workforce, and far more often it is accumulation, a long run of small moments where a person’s effort went unseen and quietly stacked up until the place stopped feeling safe to be in. Specific, genuine, spoken recognition is one of the few things that pushes back the other way.

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where the idea gets flattened in so much workplace culture content, and recognition is not a substitute for the things people are actually owed. Saying thank you is recognition, and at its heart recognition is about truly seeing someone’s hard work and the care they put in, but it cannot stop at the words, and it has to show up in fair pay and a workload a human can actually carry and decent conditions, the things that tell someone their contribution is genuinely valued and not just noticed in passing. One missed thank-you will not cost you a good employee, but when the words are missing and everything else is missing too it all compounds, and that is when some of your most capable people quietly stop bringing their whole selves to work, or start looking elsewhere.

Why your longest-serving people are the easiest to overlook

Bring that back to the person we started with, because mature-aged employees so often hold the things nobody formally measures, the workaround that saves the team an hour a week and the client relationship built up over a decade and the calm in the room during a rotten quarter. Reliability, ironically, is the very thing that makes people invisible, because we do not tend to remark on what simply works, and the longer someone has quietly delivered the more we take it for granted instead of naming it.

This matters for holding onto good people in a very practical way, because workers later in their career are often weighing up whether to stay, wind back or leave, and that decision is rarely about salary alone and turns instead on whether the place still feels like somewhere their contribution is seen. Recognition will not settle all of that on its own, but it is one of the few levers a team can actually pull today, without waiting on a policy review.

The one person to thank this week

So go back to the person you pictured at the start, the one who never asks for it, and tell them exactly what you noticed, not a breezy “great job, team” in a meeting but something true and aimed at one person. We are not complicated underneath it all, because we want to feel safe and we want to know we belong somewhere, and saying thank you hands a little of both to the person hearing it and, as the research keeps quietly proving, to the person saying it as well.

So, who is it going to be?

References

Algoe, S. B. (2012). Find, remind, and bind: The functions of gratitude in everyday relationships. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(6), 455–469.

Chancellor, J., Margolis, S., Jacobs Bao, K., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2018). Everyday prosociality in the workplace: The reinforcing benefits of giving, getting, and glimpsing. Emotion, 18(4), 507–517.

Grant, A. M., & Gino, F. (2010). A little thanks goes a long way: Explaining why gratitude expressions motivate prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(6), 946–955.

Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2018). Undervaluing gratitude: Expressers misunderstand the consequences of showing appreciation. Psychological Science, 29(9), 1423–1435.

Siegrist, J. (1996). Adverse health effects of high-effort/low-reward conditions. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 1(1), 27–41.

Safe Work Australia. (2022). Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work.