When employees receive positive feedback on their work, they are motivated to work harder and increase their productivity. This is why HR trainings talk about the importance of positive feedback. Words of encouragement as well as praise are both types of positive feedback and while many think they are the same thing, there is a difference between the two.

Words of encouragement look at the task that has been completed and give feedback on the effort rather than the outcome. They also motivate the employee to try harder and achieve more. Praise, on the other hand, focuses on the individual and their performance and doesn’t necessary call for improvements.

Is Praise Problematic? Hour

Looking at the above definitions, there may not seem to be any problems with praise. Even if it doesn’t necessarily motivate an employee to put in more effort or improve themselves or their work, praise is also a type of positive feedback and can increase employee satisfaction.

However, there are instances when praise is problematic. Inflated praise, for instance, is when the positive feedback is larger than the accomplishment or the task that was completed. This kind of praise is exaggerated and overlooks any mistakes that were made. The words of praise don’t suggest that there is room for improvement.

Calling an employee perfect, for instance, is inflated praise. It can boost an individual’s self-esteem in all the wrong ways. However, if the employee has low self-esteem, inflated praise can make them doubt their ability to achieve such levels of perfection again.

Inflated praise, when over-exaggerated, is obvious and will make the employee doubt the person praising them. HR services like LeadHRM thus discourage inflated praise as they do more harm than good.

Praise is sometimes worded in such a way that they are about living up someone’s expectations. A department head telling an employee that they are happy with the way a task was completed is called judgemental praise. Here, the praise implies what the department head’s expectations are and the employee will want to meet those expectations as opposed to completing the task because it is their job to do so.

Judgemental praise can increase self-consciousness and self-doubt in an employee, which is why executive development services, those provided by LeadHRM, for instance, discourage the use of such words of praise.

The main reason HR services like LeadHRM find this kind of praise problematic is because it is positive feedback on qualities the employee can’t control. While words of encouragement will focus on the task itself, person praise looks at the individual doing the task.

Why Are Words of Encouragement Better?

While it is clear that certain types of praise can have a negative effect on your employees, are words of encouragement any better? Management development services like LeadHRM services say that they are.

Words of encouragement provide positive feedback on the process and strategy rather than the final outcome or the individual. They act as support during the completion of a task and can motivate an employee.

Words of encouragement also make employees and teams more autonomous as they don’t rely on a seal of approval from someone in order to complete a task. HR trainings also encourage the use of positive feedback during repeatable actions so that the employees will be motivated to repeat these actions during other tasks too.

It is for reasons like this that words of encouragement are better than words of praise. Since they motivate employees as opposed to inflate their egos, HR services and HR trainings that focus on recruitment, job satisfaction, and employee retention, emphasize the need for words of encouragement as opposed to praise when it comes to positive feedback.