We Spent $50 Billion on Recognition. People Feel Less Seen Than Ever.
We have never invested more in making people feel valued at work.
Recognition platforms. Wellbeing programs. Perks, points, awards, even pet care benefits. We have outsourced recognition to a 50 billion dollar industry.
People are more disengaged than ever.
I have spent years studying what makes people flourish, and the answer keeps surprising leaders. It is not another strategy, tool, or platform. The biggest performance unlock we have is far simpler, and almost free. It is helping people feel that they matter.
I sat down with Zach Mercurio on the Flourishing Edge podcast, one of the leading voices on the science of mattering, and he put language to something I have believed for a long time. People do not need to feel valued after they add value. They need to feel valued so they can add value.
Most of our organizations run on the opposite belief. We reward value with more stuff, more perks, more programs, and wonder why none of it lands.
I think of the factories I have spent time in. People at a station, working hard, who never connect what they do to the impact it has. The work becomes only a paycheck. As leaders, we carry an obligation to help people make meaning from something they spend most of their waking hours doing.
Mattering Is a Fundamental Human Need
Zach’s work began with a pattern he kept seeing. When he studied people who were thriving at work, they almost always had one person. One person who showed them they were worthy and capable. Someone who truly saw them, truly heard them, and was consistently there for them. People who were languishing had the opposite. No one reflecting their significance back to them. No way to regenerate the energy they needed to perform.
Let me define it, because the word gets misused.
Mattering is the experience of feeling significant to the people around you. It comes from two things: feeling valued, and knowing how you add value. This is not a nicety. It is a fundamental human need, as real as the need to eat or sleep, and it does not switch off when we walk into the office.
Mattering is not the same as belonging or inclusion. We have spent a decade on those two. Belonging is feeling part of a group. Inclusion is being invited into the group. Mattering is feeling that the group would not be complete without you.
You can build belonging with a program. You can build inclusion with an initiative. Mattering only happens through an interaction.
People don’t need to feel valued because they add value. They need to feel valued so they can add value.”
Three Moves: Noticing, Affirming, Needing
Zach and his team studied thousands of people across 22 industries. When someone feels they matter, one of three things is almost always present. They feel noticed. They feel affirmed. They feel needed.
Those became three practices any leader can build.
Noticing: Is the deliberate act of paying attention and showing it. Attention is the currency of mattering. My favorite example is a manufacturing leader with 27 people who kept a notebook. Every Friday she wrote one thing to remember about each person. Every Monday she scheduled a three minute check in. Hers was the only team in a struggling plant with high engagement. Her people said it simply: she gets us. There is magic in being remembered.
Noticing also lives in the questions we ask. Most of what we call questions are really greetings. How are you. How’s work. Great noticers ask questions that are clear, open, and exploratory. Not “are you going to make the deadline on Friday?” Try “what is getting in the way of the Friday deadline, and what can I help with?” You hand the power back to the person, and you get better data.
Zach runs a phone call test with leaders. If you called a direct report out of the blue, what would their first reaction be? When the honest answer is fear, the problem is not that you are a bad leader. The problem is that too many of your questions extract rather than connect.
That one landed hard for me. I remembered calling an associate during my McKinsey years, just to ask how he was. There was a long pause. Then he said, “I have worked here seven years. You are the first partner who has called and not asked about a deliverable.” Seven years.
Affirming: Is different from appreciation or recognition. Recognition thanks people for what they do. Affirmation shows people how their uniqueness makes a unique difference. As Zach’s coach once told him, you cannot read the label when you are inside the jar. Your people are not waking up thinking about their gifts. You get to reveal what they cannot see in themselves.
A better thank you follows four steps. Describe when and where it happened. Name the behavior. Name the gift, whether it is their strength, perspective, wisdom, or purpose. Show the impact it made. We say “good job” all day. Rarely do we show people the difference they make and exactly how they make it.
Needing: Is the move Western leaders rate themselves lowest on. For 25 years we have been taught to help ourselves, to optimize ourselves, to believe no one is coming to save us. Telling someone we rely on them has come to feel almost foreign.
Try this right now. Think of one person you rely on. Now think of the last time you told them, in plain words. Most of us cannot remember.
The language is simple. If it wasn’t for you. Because of you, this happened. Name the person, name what they made possible, and say it out loud.
The clearest test is what we do when someone is absent. Most leaders do nothing when a person misses a meeting. They take notes and move on. A leader who understands mattering does the opposite. “I missed your perspective today. You have a way of asking the question no one else asks. I wrote a few things down I want your take on.” Knowing that your presence, and your absence, means something to another person is a quiet and powerful thing.
Symbols of Value Versus the Daily Experience
Here is the line from Zach I keep returning to. Nothing, no perk, no pay increase, no promotion, can make up for the daily experience of feeling unseen, unheard, and undervalued.
Nothing, no perk, no pay increase, no promotion, can make up for the daily experience of feeling unseen, unheard, and undervalued.”
Look at the numbers again. All that recognition spend keeps climbing, while Gallup reports that only 39 percent of people strongly agree that someone at work cares for them as a person. That number dropped 12 percent since 2020. You cannot solve that with a program.
When we studied this at McKinsey, one of the top reasons people leave is that they do not feel valued by their boss or company. Leaders consistently underrate it. Employees rate it near the top. That gap is the whole game. It is also why only around 20 percent of people are actually flourishing at work.
Why This Falls to the Middle
This is personal for me. One of our core programs is built around unfreezing the middle, because interactions happen where the middle touches the most people. That is where the center of gravity sits. Not at the top.
Every leader gets to choose. You can be a transmitter of stress, pressure, and expectations. You can be a transformer who takes all of that and shows up differently. People do not leave jobs. They leave bosses. Most leadership investment barely reaches past the first two rungs from the top, while the biggest impact on interactions sits in exactly the opposite place.
The research points to one style that works, in leadership and in life: high challenge, high support. Expect hard things from people. Do it in an environment where they feel seen, heard, believed in, and needed. We have over indexed on challenge and under indexed on support.
Every leader gets to choose. You can be a transmitter of stress and expectations, or a transformer who takes all of that and shows up differently.”
The Three Anti-Mattering Forces
I will leave you with a concern. Three forces are working against mattering in nearly every workplace right now.
Distraction. We have become dopamine addicts. Presence is the foundation of noticing, and I cannot notice you if I am not here.
Busyness. Back to back meetings leave no room for the follow up, the check in, the closed loop. Ask most people how they are and the answer is “busy,” because busy is what we reward.
AI. In our rush toward it, we are signaling, consciously and not, that a machine can do more than a person can. That breeds a quiet anxiety about being replaceable.
Only you can override those forces. Only a leader, one human being to another, can make people feel noticed, affirmed, and needed.
That is how we restore humanity to work. Through that, we unlock the performance, creativity, and innovation we keep chasing by every other means.
If this resonates, come find the full conversation with Ashish Kothari and Zach Mercurio on the Flourishing Edge.
Learn more about Zach Mercurio on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Zach Mercurio. above, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
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