The Power of Praise on Employee Happiness

This post originally appeared on HubSpot's Agency blog. For more content like this, subscribe to Agency.

Your sales reps might show up every day because they have to pay the rent or their mortgage at the end of the month, but it doesn't mean they are engaged or happy. 

And disengaged workers can cost you money -- in terms or productivity or lost accounts due to neglect or poor attitudes. They can also start an epidemic: Their attitudes can slowly poison the people around them, leaving you with a pretty serious HR problem. 

So what makes employees more happy and satisfied at work?

It turns out that employee recognition is the second most powerful source of employee satisfaction; it follows "achievement" yet is before "the work itself" and "advancement" in the rankings. 

According to Gallup, employees not adequately recognized at work are three times more likely to leave in the following year. So this is an important practice that needs to be systemized -- you need a process for employee recognition either weekly or monthly or quarterly. Because while we might have the thought to tell a salesperson she did a good job, we typically forget to execute on the idea and quickly move on to the next thing.

Cake HR put together the below SlideShare that details why employee recognition can't be ignored and some ideas for simple and effective ways to recognize and reward your team members.