Survey: 90% of CEOs Claim to Lead With Gratitude While Only 37% of Employees Are Satisfied With the Appreciation They Receive

By HRTech News Desk Last updated Feb 11, 2019

Majority of CEOs Resolve to Improve The Culture of Gratitude in Their Businesses in 2019

THNKS, the only relationship building management system developed for sales, finance and HR professionals, recently surveyed over 250 CEOs and employees as part of its mission to understand and support the importance of gratitude in the American workplace.

The survey showed that almost 90% of CEOs surveyed feel it is important to lead with gratitude and 88% believe their employees would give them high marks for doing so. However, just 37% of the employees surveyed indicated they are satisfied with the level of gratitude expressed in their workplace, and 96% said it is either somewhat or very important to feel appreciated at work.

“The divide between the way CEOs and their employees view gratitude in the workplace is striking and it is clearly something business leaders need to address,” said Larry Rubin, executive chairman and founder of Thnks. “This survey clearly demonstrates that employees want to be shown gratitude and CEOs want to express gratitude as both feel it’s highly important. Despite this, 55% of employees say that they are thanked either a few times a year, once a year, or never. At Thnks we are building systems that enable enterprise team leaders to more easily and consistently build these relationships both internally as well as with clients and prospects.”

The survey suggests that business leaders may benefit from expressing their gratitude more routinely. This is underscored by the fact that nearly 50% of the employees surveyed said they’d leave a job if their bosses didn’t show them enough appreciation.

“In a time of drastically low unemployment, it is more important than ever for business leaders to retain talent,” said Brendan Kamm, CEO and co-founder of Thnks. “While a summer outing or a year-end gift is nice, smaller, more frequent expressions of gratitude and individual recognition can be more impactful, especially in establishing a company-wide culture of appreciation.”

Thnks provides business professionals the ability to send gestures of appreciation that are timely and thoughtful, instantly from a mobile device or desktop. For instance, a CEO might use Thnks to send a bottle of wine to an account executive that created the perfect sales deck, or a Starbucks coffee to a tired employee whose baby cried through the night. Sales teams also utilize Thnks to foster relationships with clients and to increase the efficiency through which prospects are moved through the sales funnel.

Roughly 80% of CEOs surveyed stated that customers would give their company high rankings when it comes to gratitude, and this is balanced by 70% of employees who feel their company does a good job expressing appreciation to customers. Even though the large majority of CEOs surveyed feel they express gratitude well, 80% said they intend to improve on the way gratitude is expressed in their workplace. In 2019, these CEOs resolve to advance a culture of gratitude as an important aspect of their businesses.

The Thnks Corporate Gratitude Survey was conducted in December 2018 by 1Q, a cloud-based service that provides instant insight from highly targeted demographics. The survey gathered responses from 250 CEOs and 250 wage earners, the majority of whom identified as middle managers. 1Q’s respondents are curated based on a GDPR compliant, double opt-in system and verified through cell data, IP validation and other metrics.