Does your company need a chief appreciation officer?

Has employee appreciation become so important to companies that it warrants a position in the C-suite? According to this HR tech company, it has. 

In April of this year, Reward Gateway Edenred expanded their C-suite to include a chief appreciation officer role. The company's current chief people officer, Nebel Crowhurst took on the job as a way to put a direct focus on valuing their employees and reshaping the company's culture entirely. 

"When we looked at our own internal research, what we started talking about was closing the appreciation gap," Crowhurst says. "We wanted to make sure we made a really bold statement around what we were doing in terms of internal commitment for appreciation for our people in the organization."

Read more: Lack of psychological safety could cost companies up to $15 million a year

A study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that organizations with employee recognition programs have a lower employee turnover rate than those without such programs. In fact, 89% of employees who were recognized for their hard work reported higher job satisfaction, according to a survey conducted by Globoforce. 

"At the base of employees' hierarchy of needs are the core factors — things like pay and benefits," Crowhurst says. "Further up that hierarchy is where you find needs like communication and healthy environments where people feel like they belong. And at the top of the pyramid is appreciation." 

Employee appreciation can take a variety of forms, but common examples include productive check-ins with leadership, ongoing peer feedback or simply rewarding workers for a job well done with gifts or words of praise and encouragement. Still, despite the relative ease and benefit of these efforts, 63% of employees do not feel recognized at work and 39% of employees don't feel appreciated at all, according to a survey from employee insights platform Achievers. As a result, a survey conducted by the staffing firm OfficeTeam found that 51% of employees are ready to leave their job if they do not feel appreciated. 

Crowhurst recently spoke with EBN about her first few weeks with the new title, her plans for the future and what the normalization of this role could mean for the workplace.

Why is the creation of this role so important to how we work today? 
Decades ago, the culture was to just show up, get my paycheck, get my pension and go home. Now, employees expect us to look after them as a whole, and so that's when you should really be leaning into what your well-being strategy could look like and how you can support people emotionally, mentally, physically and financially. If you do, employees are going to be more resilient, stronger in the way in which they're able to show up and more productive. You'll start to see correlations between reduction in time off sick and in people's ability to manage broader workloads. It's in our best interests to actually meet the expectations of employees. 

What do your responsibilities look like now that you've added this role?
I've got to make sure that we bring the core tenants of employee appreciation to life from within our organization. I'm working with our leadership team to help them understand what this means and how they show up as leaders, [which involves] emotional intelligence. This means that if we're going to appreciate people as the whole human being that they are, we have to first be really self aware as leaders, and we've got to recognize the different needs people have at different times. 

Read more: Forget DEI and belonging — it's all about empowerment

How do you see that playing out in your day-to-day interactions with leaders and employees? We have a leadership team that recognizes how important it is to invest in people, and we already focus a lot on recognition. This is just an evolution for us, so I see my role as being a kind of coach and guide in how we behave as leaders. But beyond that, it's just continuing my work with my people team. We have a people strategy that leverages employee voices and data feedback from across the organization so we know what to prioritize. Fortunately for me, meeting every level of employees' needs on the pyramid is a core tenant for all of Reward Gateway Edenred. 

Are there any specific challenges organizations may be facing that keep them from prioritizing employee appreciation in this way?
I think most organizations probably face similar challenges. The economic climate is hard and the pressure then falls on organizations to create success, drive performance and be productive, and when that stress starts from within an organization, it can become easier to forget how important it is to appreciate and recognize people in your organization. What's important is to keep the narrative alive across the whole business, with leadership reminding and reinforcing the importance of practicing recognition, appreciation and all the things that go with it continuously, rather than it being something that feels like it gets forgotten. 

What strategies do you suggest to close the appreciation gap?
It's really important that organizations truly allow HR to have a voice in the business. We often talk about HR having a seat at the table, and I think sometimes we as HR leaders have to take our own accountability for that. If we can show up with credibility and commercial savvy, we should actually get our seat at the table by our own fruition, rather than expecting it to be given to us by other senior leaders. 

And then alongside that, there's not a singular formula — it's about recognizing each of those areas on the pyramid so that [appreciation] makes the most difference to your particular workforce and in the context of your business. To truly understand that, you need to listen to your people.