Your employees don’t need appreciation days. They need better systems
Published on 26 February 2024 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge
Key takeaways
Only 23% of employees globally are engaged in their organization’s success (Gallup). Many businesses succeed despite widespread disengagement.
Disengagement is often a system signal — not an individual failing. Transactional appreciation, such as gifts and events, rarely addresses root causes.
The most meaningful form of appreciation is enabling people to contribute fully to the mission that attracted them to your organization in the first place.
Only 23% of employees globally are engaged in their organization’s success. Which means most businesses are succeeding despite the majority of their workforce being disengaged.
That should raise a more interesting question than: “How do I show appreciation?”
It should be: What would performance look like if engagement wasn’t the exception?
Why appreciation often misses the point
The first Friday in March is Employee Appreciation Day.
Many organizations respond with small tokens or gestures: gifts, thank-you messages, or team lunches or events.
These are well-intentioned. But they can easily backfire.
They send a transactional signal: “This is how much we value you.”
And more importantly — they don’t address the underlying issue.
There is a more meaningful way to show your appreciation: enable each employee to use their particular brand of brilliance to contribute the most value they can to your organization’s success.
What your metrics aren’t showing you
When something feels off in a team, we often assume it’s about individuals — motivation, mindset or wellbeing.
So we respond with initiatives aimed at people.
But disengagement is rarely just a people problem. It’s a system signal.
In a company of 1,000 employees, only around 210 are engaged (Gallup — see References for details). The rest are either quietly disengaged, or actively undermining progress.
Yet performance may still appear to be improving, according to your business metrics.
That’s what makes this risky.
Because the metrics don’t show what’s missing.
When systems don’t enable contribution, a few people overcompensate, and others step back.
Over time, performance becomes concentrated in a few individuals, dependency on them increases, and risk builds.
In other words, your organization is not accessing the full capability it already has. And the system quietly reinforces that pattern.
What employees actually want
Research from McKinsey consistently shows that employees want to feel valued, experience a sense of belonging, and feel connected to purpose.
But in practice, this often translates to something more specific: they want to contribute meaningfully to your organization’s mission.
They want to use their strengths, add value, and understand how their work connects to outcomes.
When they can’t do that, engagement drops — regardless of perks or recognition.
What high-performing systems do differently
The most effective organizations focus on enabling contribution — and we can be guided by employees themselves.
A McKinsey Quarterly study compared the reasons employees gave for disengagement with the assumptions of talent-focused managers.
The mismatch was striking.
Managers believed disengagement was driven by compensation or wellbeing challenges.
Employees said something different. More than half reported not feeling valued, and not feeling a sense of belonging.
This is where many appreciation efforts fall short.
They focus on surface-level gestures rather than the conditions that enable meaningful contribution.
The most reliable route to sustained performance is to balance two dimensions:
– People performance.
– Business performance.
McKinsey’s research shows that leaders improve outcomes when they create cultures where employees feel connected through purpose, belonging, fair reward, and opportunities to grow.
This is not just good for engagement — it is the single most effective driver across the range of your business outcomes.
Where to start
If you’re seeing signs of disengagement — even in a “high-performing” team — it’s worth asking: where is our system preventing people from contributing fully?
The most meaningful way to show appreciation is by creating an environment where people can do what they came to do: use their particular brand of brilliance to contribute real value.
Start small — but make it real.
What to look for in practice
In the teams I work with, the early signals are often subtle:
Ownership being unclear or unevenly distributed.
Work being delivered by a small number of people.
Decisions being revisited or slowed unnecessarily.
Capable individuals holding back or waiting for direction.
These patterns rarely show up early on in formal business metrics.
But they are strong indicators that the system is limiting contribution.
A different kind of outcome
If you’d like to see how this shift can work in practice, I’ve written a short case study.
It shows how starting small — within one team, without a large programme or pause in delivery — can:
Broaden ownership across the team.
Reduce dependency on a few individuals.
Increase proactive contribution and engagement.
Create momentum that extends beyond the original team.
A small shift in how work happens can create a disproportionate impact.
➡️ You can find the case study here.
References
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026.
McKinsey & Company (2023) The State of Organizations: Ten Shifts Transforming Organizations.
McKinsey Quarterly (2021) ‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The choice is yours.
