Compliments & Gratitude: The Positive Organisational Culture Few Bother to Build

One of the top priorities of any organisation is establishing a positive organisational culture, one where different stakeholders support each other because they recognise themselves as part of something greater.  People need to feel recognised, enfranchised, and celebrated.  That recognition buys commitment and loyalty.

Why the Brain Treats Praise Like Money

One of the simplest ways to reinforce this culture is inculcating the habit of praise and gratitude for good work, delivered sincerely enough to raise morale.  Positive feedback mitigates stress and pressure, improving team performance.  Neuroscience confirms this is not sentiment.  MRI studies show that receiving positive feedback activates the ventral striatum, the brain’s reward centre, in much the same way a financial reward does, releasing dopamine that reinforces the behaviour that earned it in the first place.  Gallup’s own Q12 employee engagement survey found fewer than one in three American workers can strongly agree they received any praise from a supervisor in the past week, and employees who feel unrecognised are twice as likely to leave within a year.  The positive effect of praise is not merely underestimated.  Most organisations are actively starving their own workforce of a reward mechanism their own brains are already wired to respond to.

The Barrier is Not Praise; It is the Giver’s Anxiety

Psychologists have identified a critical barrier standing between organisations and this positive culture: a mistaken expectation of how effective praise actually is.  People doubt themselves and grow self-conscious when giving compliments, an unsupported anxiety that leaves them pessimistic about the effect of their own words, a kind of impostor syndrome applied to gratitude rather than achievement.  This is the barrier leadership must overcome first, by setting the example itself rather than waiting for the habit to appear on its own.

Why the Habit Rarely Takes Hold on Its Own

Even after giving a compliment, people frequently fail to grasp its actual effect on the recipient, and without seeing that effect, they never adjust their own behaviour to repeat it.  This is best addressed through group activities that build rapport and culture, and through mentors who instill the habit by example rather than instruction.  The focus should sit on the emotional sincerity behind the words, not the craft of constructing the perfect compliment.  Herbert David Kelleher, co-founder and long-serving CEO of Southwest Airlines, built much of the airline’s famously loyal workforce on this principle, personally writing thousands of handwritten notes and birthday cards to employees over his tenure, a habit small enough to sound trivial and large enough to define an entire corporate culture around genuine recognition.  For any version of this to work, it must be seen as genuine.  Compliments and gratitude should be the norm in everyday communication, not the exception, and the habit does not lose its value the moment it stops being rare.  It gains value because a culture where recognition is constant is a culture where nobody has to wonder whether their work was noticed at all.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code