Editor’s note: This is the third installment of a new column on how to improve the higher-ed workplace. Read the previous essay, “Sick and Still on the Job.”
I remember walking to my on-campus office one morning as an entry-level staff member and seeing banners adorning the light poles. Each banner featured a different faculty member, with their name and discipline, along with a catchy word or phrase about discovery or innovation. My first thought was how cool they looked with their beakers and ancient manuscripts. But just as quickly came a second thought: “That will never be me.”
I didn’t mean I could never be a professor. I meant that, as a staff member, I would never be featured on a banner. I wasn’t particularly disappointed or resentful about that realization. I mean, did I really want to see my face plastered on a campus banner? Heck no. The point is: Even at that early point in my career, I had already picked up on what I perceived to be the natural order of things on the campus. The banners may have been designed, ordered, and hung by the staff, but they only showcased the faculty.
More than a decade later, I’ve had some time to question the natural order of things. For one thing, now that I’m a tenured professor, I can safely and confidently challenge who gets showcased and why. I’ve concluded that our entire approach to recognizing and appreciating employees in higher education is broken.
Few awards and few eligible recipients. In many ways, an institution’s recognition ecosystem is a reflection of its organizational structure and culture. On many campuses, for example, performance-based awards for staff and faculty members tend to be scarce and, therefore, competitive. Simply being nominated may be a function of who you know or whether you have the gumption to self-nominate. In order to determine who, among a large number of employees, will receive the small number of awards, academe has devised the perfect bureaucratic solution: an onerous application process in which nominees must meticulously document their merit and be judged by a review committee.
The most common form of recognition I’ve come across in my research on this topic is the so-called “service” award for working at an institution for five, 10, or 20 years. The result: Excellent employees may not receive any formal acknowledgement of their work for years. But when campus awards are pegged to accomplishments instead of years of service, they often cluster around a particular set of contributions deemed valuable, such as how much grant money someone has secured or who wrote the most journal articles. Whole units of the institution are simply ineligible for campus recognitions because they aren’t considered teachers or researchers.
Even though a significant amount of work in higher education is done in teams, campus awards still tend to focus on individual stars. And rather than distribute the few awards we have to as many people doing good work as possible, sometimes the same small group of employees who’ve mastered the system keep winning year after year.
Stranger still is the fact that awards may only be loosely coupled with the institution’s stated mission and strategic goals. We frequently honor an employee’s work based on tradition, or what we valued when an award was first established, versus where the institution is today and where we want it to go.
Who really cares about awards, anyway? Perhaps this broken system hasn’t received much attention, skeptics might say, because employee recognition doesn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. The problem with that argument is that data disprove it. In a 2022 Gallup survey of 7,636 workers:
- Less than a quarter of respondents strongly agreed that they get the right amount of recognition for the work they do.
- Only a third strongly agreed that the recognition they receive is authentic.
- Only a quarter strongly agreed that recognition is given equitably at their organization.
- Just 10 percent reported being asked about their preferences for being recognized.
On the flip side, according to the survey, employees who feel fulfilled by the level of recognition at work are four times as likely to be engaged, half as likely to be looking for other job opportunities, and 44 percent are more likely to feel they are “thriving” in their life over all.
Looking at the higher-ed workplace, a sense of disrespect for employee contributions was echoed by a sizable minority of employees in The Chronicle’s 2024 Work Force Survey of 4,107 respondents (1,402 administrators, 1,447 faculty members, and 1,262 staff members). Fully a quarter of staff members in the survey and 36 percent of faculty members disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement, “My job is respected by senior administrators.”
Even more specifically, a 2023 survey of 4,782 staff members by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources found that out of 16 aspects of job satisfaction and well-being, the three with the greatest impact on employee retention were recognition for contributions, being valued by others at work, and having a sense of belonging. Only 59 percent of respondents said they receive regular verbal recognition for doing good work.
People want real recognition and genuine appreciation. The CUPA-HR survey introduces an important distinction: Official recognition at work isn’t the same thing as truly feeling valued or appreciated.
Real appreciation is, in the words of leadership expert Mike Robbins, about “acknowledging a person’s inherent value. The point isn’t their accomplishments. It’s their worth as a colleague and human being.” Appreciation doesn’t just have to come from leaders — employees can demonstrate appreciation for one another and for reasons unrelated to their professional accomplishments.
Not everyone is particularly motivated by formal recognitions like awards or campuswide kudos. In fact, when I asked my (primarily faculty) followers on Bluesky, many made clear that they aren’t interested in gold stars or engraved paperweights. More than a few stressed that money was really the only form of appreciation that mattered to them. They were more likely to be able to tap into intrinsic motivations when their basic needs were met. Others pointed to more funds for professional development, free parking, and more time and resources to seed a creative project or dream up a new course as forms of appreciation that resonated with them.
But some folks did highlight how valued they felt when a leader wrote them a genuine, personalized note of thanks. It makes a big difference, they said, when your work is acknowledged in a sincere way. Some also wanted — more than anything — for supervisors to listen to their concerns and check in on their well-being as people, not just producers.
Being a good employee isn’t just about what you do or the outcome of your work, but also how you consistently show up and carry out your responsibilities. My sense is that more staff and faculty members would be content to be thanked for the type of campus citizens they are, day in and day out, rather than based on how many events they organized or grant proposals they submitted.
What would an alternative approach to recognition and appreciation look like in academe? Over the course of my research, I’ve picked up three key insights on this front:
No. 1: Offer more and broader recognition. In the summer of 2023, while working on my forthcoming book on the higher-ed workplace, I visited the University of Louisville’s Employee Success Center. Recognition was one of the first things the center tackled when it opened in 2020. Brian Buford, assistant vice president for university culture and employee success, said he and his team noticed that there were few awards on the campus that recognized staff employees. They sometimes waited 10 years or more before they were eligible for service awards, and not all departments honored retiring staff and faculty members. In short, the recognition ecosystem was undernourished.
In response, the center created eight new awards to celebrate people who embody the university’s “eight cardinal principles” — guiding values such as integrity, agility, and accountability — as well as new awards for outstanding supervisors. Additionally, the center established a staff equivalent of the highest honor awarded to professors, with the same $5,000 bonus and recognition at the annual presidential-excellence celebration. The center also rolled out a new gift that everyone receives on their one-year work anniversary: an engraved keychain with a note from the president. Yes, it’s a small token of appreciation, and the kind of thing (like free T-shirts) that I’ve criticized in the past. But my criticism was rooted in the use of small tokens in isolation to fix big workplace problems. Conveying genuine appreciation with something small as part of a robust culture of recognition hits very differently than an ice-cream social at the height of pandemic-era burnout.
To make milestone celebrations more meaningful, the center revamped its staff service awards, which are now offered twice a year. Rather than feature a parade of administrators speaking, one person from each level of service is selected to share stories about their time at the university. In addition, thanks to the center, there’s also now a campuswide event for all retiring staff and faculty members.
And in a perfect illustration of how it’s possible to upend the “natural order” of things, the new center creates massive banners for any employees (including staff members) who have reached 40 years of service and displays them prominently on the campus. It turns out banners can be hung for whomever we decide to honor.
No. 2: Mass thank-you emails are nice; customized appreciation is better. Effective recognition must be authentic, so it’s clear to the recipients and everyone else in the organization why it’s being given and that it isn’t just a perfunctory gesture. The best recognition is also personalized, highlighting particular contributions or dispositions that are valued.
One way to better personalize your campus award system is to ask employees how they prefer to be recognized or appreciated at work. For example, Dale TeGantvoort, an institutional-research analyst at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, shared that his former supervisor met with each staff member and asked how they preferred to receive praise after a colleague said they did not like public recognition.
“This was a high-energy, student-facing office,” TeGantvoort explained to me in a LinkedIn message, “so the default was to ‘do the most,’ but this instance changed how recognition was handled. Moving forward, some recognition resulted in public displays showcasing the good work that someone had done, others resulted in their favorite candy and a signed card from the dean expressing their gratitude, and others a private email of appreciation.”
No. 3: Recognition shouldn’t just come from on high. The CUPA-HR survey noted that, for some employees, what really matters is feeling valued by their colleagues. Not every recognition needs to be a big event or an official award. Sometimes all people need to feel valued on the job are small affirmations or casual gatherings to celebrate one another.
Institutions can make it easier for regular appreciation to become part of their organizational culture.
For example, the Louisville center developed both online and paper “CARDgrams” (a reference to the university’s mascot, a cardinal) that say “Thank You,” “I Appreciate You,” and “Happy Birthday,” with space for a personal message. Laura McDaniels, the center’s senior employee-experience specialist, created a new version around Thanksgiving that said, “I’m Thankful for You.” Even though the campus was only open for a few days that week, employees sent each other more than 400 CARDgrams. “I thought that was amazing because it was such a quiet week on campus, yet people still took the time to appreciate one another,” McDaniels said.
For Buford, the center’s director, many employees enter higher education because they want to do meaningful work. “We all want to be seen for the good work that we do. We want to know that what we do matters. We don’t get that sense of being seen from just our paychecks. We have to make other forms of recognition a priority and know that it is just as important.”
The truth is that many people who work in higher education (myself included) aren’t really eager to have our faces decorating light poles across the campus. Nevertheless, there are shortcomings in how institutions recognize and appreciate employees that could be improved with even a few simple steps. Doing so is not only an antidote to turnover, but also a concrete way for institutions to align recognition with their values and strategic goals.
And here’s the kicker: Many of these approaches aren’t extraordinarily costly. Institutions could revamp how they recognize and appreciate their employees for the price of running a few searches for administrator positions. And the value created by engaged employees who stay in their jobs? The returns could easily exceed the investment.
