Do high performers want, or need appreciation?

Appreciation Expectations – do high performers have them?

This article on employee expectations looks at ‘appreciation expectations’ at work and how they impact on employee engagement.

Most employees have appreciation expectations and want their contributions to be valued and recognised. However high performing employees may not need external appreciation, relying more on their own assessment of their work, but definitely want recognition from their peers. So how does a manager discover each person’s expectations and meet them in the right way?

The 8 areas of Employee Expectations

The organisational view

Your organisation may well be able to attract top talent with a competitive salary but if their real retention and engagement factors are not met – they may soon be leaving for an environment where they can be met.

Research by Monster.co.uk found that many of us don’t feel appreciated at work and employees even have put a value to it – they think compensation of £134 a month would cover the amount for not being thanked properly for their work.

The individual’s authority expectations

Asking the right questions, and analysing each individual employee’s real engagement factors ensures managers and the wider organisation provide an environment that retains the best talent.

Appreciation Expectations

Employees who don’t feel appreciated, recognised or listened to are more likely to be unhappy at work than those that get a thank you and notice taken of their efforts once in a while.

Wants Appreciation

• The desire to have an employer who expresses appreciation for one’s work
• We all want to get some appreciation at work and those that receive it feel better and more secure. The trouble is that many employers and management staff don’t do it enough. Taking time to thank a member of staff for their great work can raise morale and put a smile on people’s faces.
• An employee who isn’t appreciated is going to care a little less about their job each day and bosses need to make sure that this basic social nicety is given more focus. If employee expectations in this area don’t match what the company provides then something will need to change.

Wants Recognition

• The desire for positive acknowledgement (from others) related to one’s abilities and strengths
• If an employee does a good job they want some kind of recognition even if it’s just sending them an email to thank them for all their hard work. Of course, there are some tireless employees who don’t want to be thanked and get embarrassed at being singled out for praise but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be shown some form of appreciation.
• It’s not just a simple thank you that employees may want. Recognition could mean the prospect of promotion or a wage increase, the chance to undertake some valuable training or not having those low grade jobs pushed onto them all the time.

Wants Warmth/Empathy

• The tendency to express positive feelings and affinity toward others
• However busy the office is, there’s always time for some warmth, particularly as it helps create a better, kinder environment that improves productivity. During stressful times understanding and empathy can often go out the window but if your employee values this kind of interaction and expects it then there needs to be more effort made on these occasions.

Wants Opinions Valued

• The desire to have an employer who listens and gives importance to one’s views
• Most career minded employees will expect to have their opinions valued. There may be those who don’t put it high up on their list of priorities but most of us like to think we have something important to say from time to time. A low score for expectations in this area could also be a sign that the person in charge is not someone who likes to listen to other opinions.

Is Collaborative

• The tendency to collaborate with others when making decisions
• It’s all very well expecting to be appreciated but if you prefer to work alone and have less focus on effective collaboration then this could point to an imbalance between what is expected and what is actually the case.
• Creating opportunities for better collaboration in an office environment can improve social cohesion and also allow everyone to work more effectively as a team.

Does everyone in the group have the same appreciation expectations?

Finding out what employee’s appreciation expectations are can be highly enlightening; by using Harrison Assessments engagement and retention analytics we can explore them in detail.

What can we interpret for this group?

• This group considers receiving appreciation to be reasonably important. It is reasonably important for management to communicate sincere appreciation for work contributions. This is best fulfilled with an occasional one-on-one communication that establishes that their contributions are understood and appreciated.
• This group considers receiving recognition to be moderately important. Consequently, it is moderately important to find ways to provide recognition. This type of recognition should be related to acknowledging their strengths and capabilities.
• This group has a strong tendency to express warmth and empathy. Consequently, it is more likely others will reciprocate with appreciation and recognition.
• This group considers it to be reasonably important for others to consider and value their opinions. Therefore, it is reasonably important that management listens to, acknowledges, and encourages their opinions. This group has a strong tendency to be collaborative with regards to making decisions. This is likely to cause others to reciprocate by being more receptive to and encouraging of their opinions.

Using Harrison Assessments Talent Solutions to understand appreciation expectations

Managers can measure an number of key employee expectations, the intrinsic behaviours that drive individual and group engagement. This helps to understand any differences between an employee as well as looking at the overall group or team’s expectations. These insights facilitate the essential dialogue between employee and manager, fostering a shared responsibility for engagement to build a culture of employee engagement.

Managers can use the Manage, Develop and Retain report as a guide to getting the best performance out of an individual member of their team, and shows how mis-matched communication and management styles could potentially demotivate a talented employee. Instead the report suggests how best to develop and engage the employee, what type of tasks to delegate and behaviours to watch out for that could impede performance.

Employee Engagement White Paper

• This employee engagement white paper will outline why this is the case and what is needed to achieve a greater impact on organisational performance.
• It includes some key areas relating to engagement in the workplace and a crucial 3-step guide to assist with the application of engagement analytics.
• Written by Dan Harrison, Ph.D. – Organisational Psychology, developer and CEO of Harrison Assessments, this white paper is a must read for anyone involved in employee engagement.  Request your copy here –

Identifying leaders based on their authority expectations

Identifying Leaders from their Authority Expectations

This article on employee expectations looks at authority expectations in the workplace and how they impact on employee engagement.

Top of the list for high performing employees is their chance to act in a position of responsibility, making decisions and taking charge of people to achieve the organisation’s goals.

As with most other desires, it’s one thing to want to be able to lead and another having the necessary traits to succeed.

The organisational view

Discovering authority expectations can help organisations identify those people likely to succeed in a management position, those that still need further training and development, and those that aren’t cut out for it.

It also helps to predict day-to-day work behaviours based on how an individual employee feels about management processes and how their performance is managed.

Does everyone in the group have the same authority expectations?

Finding out what employee’s authority expectations are can be highly enlightening; by using Harrison Assessments engagement and retention analytics we can explore them in detail.

For instance, an individual might have the potential to take on a leadership role but needs to develop the motivation and soft skills for managing their team.

What can we interpret for this group?

• This group has a moderate desire to work autonomously. It is important to consider this desire related to the amount of autonomy required or given related to the job. It is also important to consider the tendency to take initiative related to the desire for autonomy.
• This group has a strong tendency to take initiative and thus, the initiative is sufficient for the amount of autonomy desired. They will have greater motivation if given opportunities to take initiative. Assuming this group has the necessary experience and skills, give opportunities for initiative wherever possible and carefully explain the initiative that can and cannot be taken.
• This group has only a moderate desire to take a leadership role. And, this group tends to be moderately willing to accept decision-making authority.
• This group tends to be moderately willing to accept a great deal of structure placed on them by the organisation.

The individual’s authority expectations

Asking the right questions, and analysing each individual employee’s real engagement factors ensures managers and the wider organisation provide an environment that retains the best talent.

Authority Expectations: Leaders vs. Followers

Authority expectations are key to understanding how individuals relate to the whole structure of a company and where they see the role within it.

They are also a key indicator of how responsive individuals will be to coaching and further development, and what form this should take if the organisation wants to nurture their potential.

Wants Autonomy

• The desire to have freedom or independence from authority
• Wanting autonomy can be a sign that someone, of course, doesn’t like being told what to do, or it could be an indication that an employee wants to except the challenge of leading within the company.
• The idea working towards being ‘your own boss’ is appealing because you don’t have anyone telling you what to do but it also means you are personally responsible when things go wrong. An employee who wants to have greater autonomy will need to handle the pressure and work within the structure of the company and that invariably involves developing new skills.

Takes Initiative

• The tendency to perceive what is necessary to be accomplished and to proceed on one’s own
• More and more businesses are now looking for employers who have an ingrained sense of entrepreneurship and who are better able to take the initiative when needed. They don’t simply want people who get on with their day job but those that will come up with new ideas and new directions.
• Taking the initiative is one thing but can come with consequences if your employee gets it wrong and acts without telling someone. Taking the initiative can have a wider framework than just for those looking to take charge – spotting evidence of good initiative in employees can help mark them as candidates for future development and promotion.

Wants to Lead

• The desire to be in a position to direct or guide others
• Despite popular opinion, leaders are made, not born. Someone needs to make a conscious decision to do it and they have to learn the skill sets and undertake the training to achieve their goals and have a clear awareness of where their weaknesses are and how these can be addressed.
• Just because someone wants to lead a team doesn’t mean that they are likely to be good at it. The urge to be in charge needs to be balanced with the work that has to be done to achieve success and other signs such as lack of self-motivation may be more pertinent indicators of a particular individual’s worth in this area.

Is Authoritative

• The desire for decision-making authority and the willingness to accept decision-making responsibility
• Being authoritative is not the same as being a leader. You need to have the capacity or the potential to take a number of staff with you and that only comes from being secure and confident in your communication skills as well as other abilities.

Is Tolerant of Structure

• The tolerance of following rules, schedules, and procedures created by someone else
• All businesses have a structure and rules of conduct, hierarchies and the like that apply to staff whether they are working on reception or in the boardroom. A potential top performer who is not tolerant of structure and something of a loose cannon may well have to be given the appropriate advice and training to help bring them into synch with the company ethos.

Using Harrison Assessments Talent Solutions to understand authority expectations

Managers can measure an number of key employee expectations, the intrinsic behaviours that drive individual and group engagement. This helps to understand any differences between an employee as well as looking at the overall group or team’s expectations. These insights facilitate the essential dialogue between employee and manager, fostering a shared responsibility for engagement to build a culture of employee engagement.

Managers can use the Manage, Develop and Retain report as a guide to getting the best performance out of an individual member of their team, and shows how mis-matched communication and management styles could potentially demotivate a talented employee. Instead the report suggests how best to develop and engage the employee, what type of tasks to delegate and behaviours to watch out for that could impede performance.

Employee Engagement White Paper

• This employee engagement white paper will outline why this is the case and what is needed to achieve a greater impact on organisational performance.
• It includes some key areas relating to engagement in the workplace and a crucial 3-step guide to assist with the application of engagement analytics.
• Written by Dan Harrison, Ph.D. – Organisational Psychology, developer and CEO of Harrison Assessments, this white paper is a must read for anyone involved in employee engagement.  Request your copy here –

Case Study: The entrepreneurial warehouse managers

Organisations seek to to attract and retain the best talent for specific roles and more importantly – the right cultural fit.

Even organisations that outsource their selection processes have told us that although outsourcing solves the initial sorting process it often does nothing for the ‘cultural fit’ of applicant to organisation. In fact, the CIPD recently published statistics showing that only 8% of organisations are actually happy with their talent management approach. In our experience there are a number of reasons for this  – disparate methods being used at differing levels and in different areas of the organisation and the perception of cost and dissatisfaction with assessment tools are among the most common.

So how do you measure company values?

It has become common practice for business trainers/facilitators to help organisations identify their values and connect these to the behaviours expected in support of these values. Harrison Assessments helps to identify the behaviours behind the values in a way that hasn’t been easy before.

How do companies measure employee performance against their values?

The concept is simple. If something is important to us as human beings we will behave in a way that supports this value. So behind each value must be a set of behavioural competencies and behind each competency is a set of behavioural traits.

Case Study: The entrepreneurial warehouse managers

We were recently working with an organisation who have a strong value around entrepreneurship. They wanted all their warehouse managers to behave in an entrepreneurial way as if the business was their own. Of course this can mean different things to different people and it took time to establish what was really required in terms of behaviour. For example true entrepreneurs can be very high risk takers unable to convey their vision to others. This is certainly not what the organisation was looking for. When we broke it down we discovered that what was actually required was –

• Essential traits – optimism, persistence, self-acceptance, self- improvement, the ability to take initiative, enthusiasm for the role, the ability to be open and reflective and some warmth and empathy.
• Desirable traits – collaboration, effective enforcing, a desire to lead, a systematic approach, the ability to work as a team, diplomacy, frankness, the ability to enlist co-operation, the ability to handle conflict, flexibility, helpfulness and tolerance of structure
• Traits to avoid – rebellious autonomy, harshness, insensitivity, evasiveness, imprecision caused through speed, scepticism, permissiveness and slow precision.

Taking a closer look at these you may say that some entrepreneurs will fit into this profile but others definitely not. So gaining a clearer picture was essential to fully understand what the organisation was looking for.

All the other company values were analysed in the same way to produce an overall profile against which the company can measure accurately.

So now the company has an accurate measuring tool as well as a clearer understanding of their own expectations in relation to their advertised values. This not only represents a huge cost saving in making sure they recruit people who will fit the culture, it highlights automatically areas for development for existing employees and forms the basis for personal development plans. A next possible step is to incorporate this measurement into the appraisal system thus making it easier for managers to have conversations which may previously have been avoided.

Emotional Intelligence – how to measure it

At Harrison Assessments we are often asked if we can measure the behavioural traits that make up Emotional Intelligence.  The short answer is that, because HATS utilises working preferences the whole system measures emotional intelligence.  If we enjoy what we are doing then emotional behaviour will reflect that, if we don’t then our emotional behaviour will reflect that too.

However, now we can measure Emotional Intelligence in a way that has never been done before.  The unique SmartQuestionnaire™ measures 175 behavioural preferences in a way that is highly accurate.  The Emotional Intelligence profiles can be assessed against the SmartQuestionnaire™ answers with precise results.  Each profile is made up from a set of essential traits, some desirable traits and some traits to avoid.

Take ‘Relationship Leadership’ for example  –

• Essential traits include influencing, analyses pitfalls, authoritative collaboration, collaborative, effective enforcing, enlists cooperation and wants to lead.
• Desirable traits include diplomacy, frankness, handles conflict, persistent, planning, experimenting, negotiating, provides direction, assertiveness, organised, pressure tolerance, psychology, research/learning, teaching, risking, tolerance of bluntness.
• Traits to avoid include bluntness, authoritarian, defensive, dominating, harsh, insensitive, permissive, rebellious autonomy and sceptical.

The other 3 constituent parts of Emotional Intelligence have their own profiles under the headings –

• Knowing Oneself
• Self-Motivation and Self-Management
• Social Awareness and Service Orientation

All 4 are pulled together in one report enabling organisations to measure individuals for emotional intelligence and create development plans accordingly.

If you would like to know more about measuring emotional intelligence please call 44 (0)7768 922244, or complete the enquiry form below.