Local authors chew on 'The Carrot Principle'

Do you feel unappreciated at work?

Are your accomplishments ignored by your boss?

Is the praise you do receive so general that it is quickly forgotten?

If so, you're not alone, according to Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, authors of the new book "The Carrot Principle" (Free Press, $21).

Gostick and Elton, executives with Salt Lake-based employee-recognition firm O.C. Tanner Co., say in "Carrot" that research shows managers who use constructive recognition to motivate employees can help both their workers and their company's bottom line.

In other words, you might want to clip this column and surreptitiously leave it on the desk of your nonpraising boss.

Gostick says he and Elton have been writing about this subject for about a decade, but they never had quantifiable evidence that recognition makes a difference in organizations. Then they ran across The Jackson Organization, a Laurel, Md., market research firm that had a 200,000-person database of employees at companies nationwide who are interviewed every year.

"We asked them to cut the data to look at recognition," Gostick says. "They were rather startled by the results, that recognition not only has sort of a correlation to strong business results, but it has an extremely strong correlation to managers who are perceived as better on (what the book calls) the Basic Four — goal setting, communication, trust and accountability."

For example, of the people who report the highest morale at work, 94.4 percent agreed that their managers were effective at recognition. But the majority of employees who reported low morale gave their managers failing grades in that regard.

The data also show companies that effectively recognize excellence have a return on equity more than three times higher than that of firms that do not do well at recognition. You may not know what return on equity is. But I promise it's important to your boss.

"Chester and I were ... amazed at the impact that effective recognition could have on an organization's profitability," Gostick says.

But for some reason, 32 percent of managers in North America still have a negative feeling about employee recognition, Gostick says. Even though giving a little praise can lead to lower employee turnover, higher worker engagement and a better bottom line, these managers don't think it's worth their time.

"And yet, it costs so little to say thank you on a regular basis, or to send a note of thanks," Gostick says.