How to recognize great work on your team even when budget is tight

Engagement is down in the workplace. People are not feeling connected to their work. And a huge, huge reason for that is there is a lack of recognition. People feel like, well, why am I even here? We are under a ton of economic pressure. So maybe financial incentives are down, maybe bonuses are lower, raises are lower. And so we’re forgetting, we’re losing sight of the fact that we can appreciate and recognize people in so many different ways.

Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less. I’m Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, and most of all, stress. Doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be.

Are a new manager learning the ropes or a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Managing people is the hardest thing about running a business or being a team leader. I mean, of course it is, right?

We’re dealing with people. And doing it well, well, that’s even harder. After hearing over and over from the leaders I was working with, just tell me what I need to do to make managing easier, I decided to create something. Enter your Legendary Leader Action Tracker. This is a list of 10 things you can do every week to show up better for your team, get out of the weeds, and make both your and your team members’ jobs easier.

Grab the tracker at leahgarvin.com slash action tracker and get ready to take a sigh of relief knowing that you don’t have to figure this out alone. Welcome back to the show. Today, I want to talk about a very simple, simple, small thing that you can do on your teams every single day to drive higher performance, and that thing is recognition. Okay, thanking people, expressing gratitude, appreciating them. This is transformational when it comes to motivation, when it comes to people stepping up and doing their best.

But we don’t just send a good job or a thank you email. We’ve got to be specific. So first, I want to talk about what happens in the absence of recognition and then a couple strategies for how to do it. So in the absence of recognition, I mean, how does any of us feel? Even if words of affirmation aren’t our love language, we all want to know where we stand. We all want to know, okay, I’m appreciated.

I’m doing a good job. This kind of thing is on the right track. And what we’re seeing more often than not through Gallup reporting and McKinsey and Lena and Women in the Workplace, all of these sources that talk about what is the state of people in the workplace in general, from any industry, from any country even, engagement is down in the workplace. People are not feeling connected to their work. And a huge, huge reason for that is there is a lack of recognition.

People feel like, well, why am I even here? We are under a ton of economic pressure, so maybe financial incentives are down, maybe bonuses are lower, raises are lower. And so we’re forgetting, we’re losing sight of the fact that we can appreciate and recognize people in so many different ways. Now, when our team members don’t feel recognized, they start to kind of do the bare minimum. They think, okay, you know, well, if no one cares, you know, how I’m showing up or if nothing matters or nothing’s ever good enough or I have no idea or I can’t even just get a thank you, we start to think, well, I am just going to put in the bare minimum.

And this is one of those things that has led to phenomenons like quiet quitting and bare minimum Mondays. And now I’m seeing quiet vacationing where people don’t even really tell anyone they’re going on vacation, right? I did a Trends Day Wednesday episode about that. And this is extremely problematic. Your team members feeling like, well, I’m just going to show up and give minimum bar and I still think I should be getting a raise at the end of the day and a bonus.

And I’m still asking for promotion, even though I haven’t done really more than the bare minimum. The reason we get to this place is because folks aren’t feeling recognized and appreciate it. And I think this can be really scary when financial times are tight, when you don’t have a lot of discretionary budget to give for things like bonuses and raising. As a business owner, as a team leader, you might think, well, I don’t have a tool to appreciate or recognize people.

What am I supposed to do? The solution here is really understanding your team members appreciation language. Maybe that is words of affirmation. Maybe it is a thank you. Maybe it’s a team activity and fueling that thing, even when you can’t necessarily give that thing. So for example, if you know more than anything, your team member really wants a promotion, what you can do is, is recognize that, talk about how you are working towards that, even if you can’t give that to them right now.

So for example, saying to your team member, hey, Sarah, I know that, you know, I really want to recognize the great work that you’ve done this last quarter. You really stepped up and organized this project really well. And you were mentoring people on the team and all of this is setting up so well for that promotion. Now, this cycle, we just don’t have the budget and the business need to give you that title change, but I want you to know like all of this stuff is adding up and I have my line of sight on getting you there.

So you can speak to it and you can validate it and you can recognize it and you can speak specifically to the things that the person is doing to get them there, even though you can’t give them that thing. Very similar with, with increase in pay or bonus. You can say, John, I know that getting paid more, getting that bonus, get that raise is really what you’re working towards. And I am aware of it. Here are some of the things that I am doing to enable that.

We have this profit goal. And if we hit this number, we are all going to get there. So here are some of the specific things you can do to help us get there. Right? So you’re not just promising something you can’t give. You’re recognizing that that’s what that person wants. And you’re talking about specific ways that you are working together to get there. I want you to not be afraid of leaning in and talking about someone’s appreciation language and how they want to be recognized, even if you can’t honor it, because you can honor it by validating it and talking about how you’re going to get there.

So to not shy away from talking about things like money or raises or promotions, if you feel like, well, I can’t promise that. So I kind of want to ignore it. Because the problem is when you’re ignoring it, your team members are looking for another job where the person’s going to talk about that. Did you know that I do team workshops on all of the stuff that I talk about on this show with large companies like Google and also with startups and small businesses like marketing agencies, law firms, and med spas?

Whether it’s making those feedback conversations a little less awkward, how to support your team through all of the change and uncertainty making us all well, a little on edge right now, or delegating to empower your team to step up as owners. I come into your teams and give you the tools you need to wrestle with all this tough stuff and feel like you’ve got it handled. Reach out at hello at leahgarvin.com or pass my info along to the decision maker in your company and let’s make all this team stuff easier and a lot more fun.

I will assure you, and I’ve said this to so many clients that I work with, if a team member comes to you and asks you for a raise or a bonus or promotion, that is not the first time they’ve thought of that thing. They have been thinking about that thing for months and they have been waiting to muster up the courage to ask you. You want to get ahead of this. You want everyone to know when do we talk about bonuses?

When do we talk about raises? You want people to always feel appreciated, always be very clear on where they stand so that they’re not sitting there wondering and thinking, well, there’s no path for me, so I should just move on, right? Because you know what costs more than giving someone a bonus? Having to rehire someone, right? Hiring is the most expensive thing. Hiring, onboarding people, doing all the work to recruit, interviewing, getting your team members, the thrash of getting someone new on board, that is expensive.

So if someone wants a $2,000 bonus or something like that, like way better to do that than to have to start all over. But that’s not even necessary if we’ve really figured out what are the things that we’re doing all of the time to recognize and appreciate people. Now let’s talk about thank yous and verbal recognition. This is something that we often get wrong. We say great job or nice job or thank you, that was awesome.

We don’t say anything specific. Was it awesome that I showed up for work today? Or was it awesome that through a really difficult tense meeting, I kept the energy in the group very calm, I answered everyone’s questions, I reined a derailed conversation back in and we got to the end of the meeting with a really clear plan for next steps. That’s the awesome job I did. Not the fact that I showed up to the meeting. We want to recognize our team members very, very specifically so that they understand, wow, that great thing that I did, they saw me.

That thing that I did, I can reproduce that. I can do more of that. When we’re giving recognition, I always suggest to use the situation behavior impact framework where we talk about when this thing took place. That was awesome. I just said in the meeting, the behavior wrangled a really difficult conversation, difficult to the stakeholders, really tense situation and impact. We were able to close that meeting with a really clear action plan. The impact of that was we don’t have to get everyone together again.

We have next steps. We were able to diffuse tension, all of that great stuff. Now I know exactly how to reproduce that. Now I know that this is a superpower I can be leaning into. I feel seen because my manager didn’t just say, yes, something about that meeting really went well. They said, you did something really awesome. I’m proud of you. We want to keep seeing that. When we recognize people verbally, this is how we create currency in that bank.

Again, even if we don’t have money to spend at the moment. Now, I will say people also go to work to get paid. We can’t just give verbal recognition instead of money all the time. I’m not suggesting that. We want to be giving verbal recognition. We want to be giving financial incentives. We want to be doing all of it. It’s really well-rounded. This is going to make our team members feel appreciated. Now, one other strategy that I have heard, and I love this, is especially when you have a closer knit team to instead of necessarily giving a financial bonus, allocating a budget to some sort of experience for the team.

This I heard from an awesome entrepreneur, Miriam Laundrie, who runs a book publishing mastermind, teaching folks how to create, write, and publish their own children’s book. With her team, every year, they come together and they decide on an experience they want to do together. One time, they all took everyone to Disneyland or Disney World, and they had the most amazing time. Everyone, they had selected that as their activity together. They planned how they were going to get there.

They were planning all the activities. They planned with the budget they needed. They all collectively worked to hit that profit goal that was then invested into taking this trip. They had the best time. The motivation on the team continued to skyrocket because everyone was in it together. They wanted to be together. They actually wanted to utilize this extra money on the experience together because they felt that bought into the team. This was a way that Miriam was able to show, I appreciate you, I see you, and I want to give you the exact incentive that you are excited about and you believe in.

This year, they’re working right now to figure out what is that experience they want to do because that meant more to that team than getting a 500 bucks in their paycheck at the end of the year, or maybe even a couple thousand dollars, depending on where you’re at. They wanted that experience, and she tapped into exactly that was that team’s appreciation language. They talked about it. They said, hey, you know what? We all have collectively decided this is how we want to feel recognized.

Her team and her business is thriving because she is investing in her team and making sure they feel seen and recognized. This is something. It’s simple. We can do it every single day. We can do it if we have a little bit of financial leeway, and we can do it if we don’t. Saying thank you in a genuine, specific way with very concrete examples and really understanding that appreciation language of your team members. Again, if you can’t honor it necessarily, you’re still speaking to it.

You’re still painting the picture of how you’re going to get there. You’re showing up and you’re doing that. When you can, as much as you can, you do pay people more money. You do show them there’s a financial incentive there, because that is, at the end of the day, why most of us go to work. It’s a big part of it, at least. We do need to see that there is a financial incentive in some point in some way.

It’s not about bait and switching and saying, like, ooh, instead of a holiday bonus, I’m going to give you a nice shiny thank you card. No, it’s about doing all the things, these little simple things all the time, making it a habit of recognizing people on a regular basis. That’s why it’s one of the 10 things I have in my legendary leader action tracker, because we can’t forget this. I encourage you to do this every single week.

Figure out, find a way to recognize all of your team members in some capacity on a regular basis. This is going to change their engagement on the team. It’s going to continue to fuel their motivation. It’s going to fuel that ownership mindset that sets them up to think bigger about problems, think outside the box, think in terms of solutions. We get that intrinsic motivation when we feel recognized and appreciated. And again, it’s simple. You can do it every day.

And if you need support, you always know you can come to me. Hello at LeeHarmer.com, reach out on LinkedIn, and see you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it.

See you next time.