Gratitude at work: what helps and what feels forced

A little thanks goes a long way

Adam Grant and Francesca Gino (2010) ran a set of experiments on what thanks does to the person who receives it. People who received a short note of thanks for helping were more willing to help again, both the person who thanked them and someone else entirely. In a field experiment with university fundraisers, a short visit from a manager to say thank you increased the number of calls the fundraisers made in the following week.

The interesting part was why. Thanks did not mainly work by making people feel more capable. It worked by making them feel socially valued: that their work mattered to someone. That is a useful guide to how to say it.

Good things spread

Joseph Chancellor and colleagues (2018) studied a Spanish company where some employees were asked to do small acts of kindness for a list of colleagues over four weeks. Both the givers and the receivers benefited in wellbeing, and the receivers went on to do considerably more kind things for others than a control group did. It was a kindness study rather than a gratitude study, but it shows how appreciation and kindness at work tend to pass along.

Why we under-thank

Kumar and Epley (2018) found that people writing thank you notes consistently underestimated how much the recipient would enjoy it and overestimated how awkward it would feel. At work, add a fear of seeming fake or political. The result is a lot of unspoken appreciation.

The fix is not a company-wide recognition scheme. It is lowering the bar for the specific, private thank you.

How to thank people at work

Thanks that lands has a few things in common:

• Be specific. “Thanks for rewriting the handover doc; it saved me an hour this morning” beats “great job”.
• Name the effect. Say what difference it made, to you, the team or a customer. That is the social worth Grant and Gino found people respond to.
• Thank people who are rarely thanked: the people who keep systems running, answer the same questions, or clean up after launches.
• Keep it proportionate. A two line message is often better than public praise, which some people find uncomfortable.
• Thank upward and sideways too. Managers hear complaints much more often than thanks.

What feels forced

Mandatory gratitude rituals at the start of meetings, recognition quotas and thank you points tend to feel hollow, because the thanks is no longer chosen. People can tell the difference between being appreciated and being managed.

Gratitude also should not be used to dismiss real problems. “Be grateful you have a job” is not gratitude; it is a way of ending a conversation. If a workplace has a workload or fairness problem, thanks is not the remedy.

Remote and hybrid teams

When a team works apart, the small moments of thanks disappear first. There is no passing someone's desk to say “that was great in there”. Appreciation has to be written, which makes it feel more formal, so it happens less.

Two habits help. Send the thank you while it is fresh, in a direct message rather than a busy channel, and keep it to a sentence or two. And when a piece of work lands well, name the people behind it, including the ones whose part was invisible on the call.

A private habit for work days

Work days have a way of being remembered by their worst hour. A private three good things habit, at the end of the working day, rebalances that. It might be the meeting that ended early, the colleague who backed you up, or the bug that finally made sense.

Doing it at the end of the work day also works as a small boundary: you close the day by naming what went right, and then you stop. It also makes thanking people easier, because you have noticed what they did.

Keep it somewhere private. A work gratitude list is more honest if nobody at work can read it. Gratitude keeps your words on your phone with no account needed; read more about keeping a private journal.

For managers

If you lead a team, your thanks carries more weight than you think, and its absence does too. Make specific thanks a weekly habit: notice one person's contribution and tell them what it changed. Do it privately at first. Do not turn it into a metric.

For thanks closer to home, see our guide for couples. If work is the source of most of your worry, our guide on gratitude and anxiety is honest about what gratitude can and cannot do.