Building More: A Company’s Appreciation

Words: Corey Adams

So instead of just jumping right into dollars and cents, I am going to skip it entirely. This article isn’t about appreciation in value. It is about the appreciation you show to others. Do you appreciate your employees, clients, subcontractors, or your boss?

We are all taught from a young age that saying please and thank you are good manners. It is true. It is good practice to use please and thank you constantly in everyday life. There is a caveat to it, or dare I say a problem with it. "Please" and "thank you" are used so much in the business world that they have become words that many of us are immune to.

Now I am not advocating for negligence when it comes to politeness or acknowledgment. I am just extrapolating it out a bit for perspective. We all know that we need to show appreciation to everyone that makes the company go ’round. How we say it can make a world of difference.

I started doing a couple of things differently a few years back. I was looking for ways to make what I was saying stand out and come across more genuinely. The first step I took seemed stupid at first, but it helped. It wasn’t even a stroke of brilliance on my part. It was a punctuation change in my emails.

One day I thought to myself, I am really thankful for what this person just did. I wanted them to know how thankful I was without writing a long, drawn-out, sappy email. So I just added an exclamation point to the end of "thank you" in my email. That was it. Within minutes, I received the obligatory “no problem” email back with a little surprise added—an exclamation point. What I did was noticed. That person truly felt that I was thanking them. Ever since, I have added exclamation points to all the emails I could. I have no doubt that it has softened many email threads and given the receiver a bit more insight into how thankful I really was. But enough of the dumb stuff.

The next step I took that I live by is not telling people thank you when they do something for me. I replaced it with the word appreciate. “I appreciate it,” “I appreciate you,” or any other phrase I can work it in. Appreciation is the highest form of thanks. Anyone can say thank you, but do they really appreciate it?

I remember one of the first people I said it to in the industry. It was a foreman who had taken a bit of browbeating through not much fault of his own but was sensitive enough that he took it that way. We had a nice conversation where he opened up and dug into his frustrations. At the end of it, I simply said, “I appreciate you” as I shook his hand and headed for the truck. The look on his face, specifically his eyes, told me the whole story. No one had ever told him that about his work. I will admit it caught me off guard a bit. I remember driving home thinking, wow, no one has ever told him that? Wild. From that day on, two things happened. He worked his ass off to help the company succeed any way he could, and I started saying it to everyone.

Humans crave appreciation for their efforts. A simple thank you is just the chips and salsa appetizer to the full 7-course meal that is “I appreciate you.” When people know you appreciate them, they work harder, are happier, and produce better results. It is a fact.

It doesn’t stop with employees. Appreciate your subcontractors, and possibly more importantly, your clients. Tell them every chance you get that you appreciate what they are doing for YOU. None of us could be where we are without people rooting for and helping us along the way. Take the time to show real appreciation toward everyone that has contact with your company, and while you are at it, do it with an exclamation point.
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