Jobs Should Offer Praise And Raises

Everybody likes to be noticed. But, too often, we toil in obscurity.

Bosses just don’t give out enough compliments. Some don’t ever say a nice word about a nice job; others may give an occasional pat on the back, but it rings hollow.

Praise may sound like a fuzzy feel-good topic - smacking of a group hug in the middle of a meeting - but compliments are an important motivator at work. Done well, they stimulate more good work. But if they’re done poorly - or not done at all - it depresses morale.

Most people are uncomfortable about giving an employee a pat on the back, so they just give out a raise, said Maury Hanigan, who teaches companies how to retain their key workers.

“The boss assumes the raise speaks for itself,” said Hanigan, chief executive officer of the Hanigan Consulting Group, a human resource strategy firm in New York City.

That practice is especially common among investment banking firms, she said. The amount of the year-end bonus, which is typically several times the size of the base salary, is the annual signal of what the firm thinks of an employee’s performance.

Some managers find it is hard to pay a compliment because it is too personally intimate, Hanigan said. And the embarrassment runs two ways, she said. Some employees have trouble acknowledging praise - the old, “you like this dumpy old dress?” Try “why, thank you very much” the next time the boss says something nice.

There’s an art to praising employees, experts said.

It’s important, for example, to be specific about what was good about the job, said Frank Shipper, professor of management at Salisbury State University in Salisbury, Md.

It’s also important to be discriminating about what to praise, Hanigan said. Only give it for extraordinary work, she said.

A gusher who goes on about how everything you do is fantastic doesn’t come across as sincere, which may be worse than never hearing a good word. A constant stream of general praise becomes white noise, Hanigan said.

Praise needs to be immediate. Mention the good deed when it was done.

Don’t wait for the annual evaluation

Vance Christopher said he tries to point out excellent work right away to his employees.

“I use the Golden Rule: Treat people the way you’d like to be treated,” said Christopher, a lawyer who does civil trial work at Crain, Caton & James in Houston and is known as a good boss.

But he also emphasized that he doesn’t praise everything. If someone is doing mediocre work, praising it would just lead to more mediocre work, he said.

That approach is really appreciated, according to his longtime legal secretary, Barbette Stone.

“He doesn’t let anything go by without being acknowledged,” Stone said.

Lots of lawyers blame their mistakes on their secretaries, clerks or paralegals. It’s endemic to the profession.

But not Christopher, Stone said. She said she has never heard her boss publicly blame anyone else for a blunder.

When it’s time for a compliment, just pay the compliment and stop talking

It’s bad form when managers tie the praise to a suggestion on how to do it better next time, Hanigan said. While the boss sees the remark as admiring and helpful, it really undercuts the value of the praise because the employee discounts the nice words and focuses on the criticism, she said.

It’s also important to back the praise up with - how do we say it - money.

It’s terribly frustrating to hear only positive things during the year and then get the same raise as everybody else, Shipper said.

“That’s about as demotivating to high performers as can be,” he said.

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