Recognise This! – Directly saying “thank you” in a detailed way to others not only improves your own happiness, but in a workplace environment, can also drive deep, positive, long-lasting change.

Today I want to point you to three resources I’m quite proud of or was deeply touched by in the past week.

HR HAPPY HOUR: Eric Mosley on The Crowdsourced Performance Review

First, Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane (both bloggers I regularly follow at Steve’s HR Technology blog and Trish’s HR Ringleader blog and both influential in creating the always excellent HRevolution conference) invited Globoforce CEO Eric Mosley to share his ideas on The Crowdsourced Performance Review on their latest “HR Happy Hour” blog radio show. Just one of the important points Eric made in the show was:

“Visibility – that’s an incredible asset companies gain when they run social recognition programmes that have a high cadence of frequency of recognition. They’re life-logging the culture of the organisation. Lots of little wins get recorded that would have just slipped through the cracks of time. In social recognition, they get recorded. Over time, there’s a portfolio of these little instances of goodwill between people. The company as a resource now has life-logged a lot of the achievements, wins and high performance in the company. This gives a number of different insights. Most important is the insight into high performers they never knew they had in the past. When I talk to our customers who are department heads they are able to quickly see through the graphical interface who on their teams is being recognised. There is nearly always a surprise one or two employees on the team who are helping so many people in the company that just flew under the radar. The crowd is now saying: ‘This person is essential and a good part of why we do great work here.’”

GLOBOFORCE BLOG: The Essential Link between Happiness & Gratitude (terrific video)

I would be remiss if I did not share this very touching video testing out this point: “Psychologists have scientifically proven that the greatest overall contributing factor to overall happiness in your life is the amount of gratitude you show.”

Please, go to the link above and watch the video. The research tested showed a much larger jump in happiness for people who took the time and made the effort to personally and directly express their gratitude to another person. And the person that experienced the biggest jump in happiness was the one who was the least happy at the start of the experiment.

COMPENSTION CAFÉ: A Legal Perspective on the Pitfalls of Employee of the Month Programmes

Last week I shared insight from the U.S. National Law Review on how employee of the month programmes can do far more damage than employee disengagement and demotivation to actually cause potential discrimination lawsuits or other pejorative actions. I also share ideas on how to fix these often troubled programmes and derive much greater business benefit from your employee recognition efforts.