There’s a difference between a business owner who recognises their staff and a business where recognition is genuinely part of the culture. The first depends entirely on one person remembering to do it. The second is self-sustaining – it happens even when you’re busy, even when things are difficult, and even when you’re not in the room.
Building that kind of culture takes more than introducing a new initiative or setting a reminder on your phone. It’s about the everyday signals you send: what you notice, what you talk about, how you respond when things go well, and whether the people around you feel that their effort actually registers.
The good news is that in a small business, culture is easier to shape than in a large one. You don’t have layers of management to convince or a long history of habits to undo. If you decide to do things differently, people will notice almost immediately.
Culture is built in ordinary moments
It’s tempting to think of culture as something you create through big gestures – a team away day, a new recognition scheme, a values workshop. Those things can help, but they’re not where culture actually lives. Culture lives in the small, repeated moments: how a Monday morning feels, whether people are comfortable sharing good news, how mistakes are handled, whether the default mood in your workplace is one of pressure or one of possibility.
If you want appreciation to become part of your culture, start by asking yourself what signals you currently send in those ordinary moments. When someone solves a problem, do you move straight on to the next issue, or do you take a beat to acknowledge what just happened? When a team member goes beyond what was asked of them, does it feel expected and unremarked, or does it land somewhere?
None of this requires lengthy conversations or formal processes. It can be as simple as pausing before moving on, making eye contact, and saying “that was a good piece of work – thank you.” Repeated consistently, these small moments accumulate into something that people can feel.
Make appreciation visible and normal
One of the quiet obstacles to a culture of appreciation is that many people – managers included – feel slightly awkward expressing it openly. It can feel embarrassing, overly soft, or professionally unnecessary. In workplaces where this goes unaddressed, appreciation ends up happening privately at best, or not at all.
You can shift this by making appreciation visible enough that it becomes normal. When you thank someone in front of others, it does two things at once: it recognises the individual and it signals to everyone present that this is how things work here. Over time, people begin to mirror that behaviour, and what started as your habit becomes a shared one.
This applies to written communication too. An email that copies in the wider team when praising someone’s contribution, a message in a group chat that names what a colleague did well – these are small acts that cumulatively build a different kind of atmosphere. The key is that they feel genuine, not performative. People can tell the difference.
Hire and onboard with appreciation in mind
Culture is also shaped by who you bring into the team and how you introduce them to the way things work. If appreciation matters to you, say so explicitly when you’re hiring – not as a selling point, but as a genuine description of your expectations. You want people who are willing to acknowledge a colleague’s contribution, not just receive it.
During onboarding, make your approach concrete. Show a new team member the kudos board or the team channel. Tell them about the habit of shout-outs in meetings. Explain that when they see something a colleague does well, you’d genuinely like them to say so. This isn’t about enforcing positivity – it’s about making clear from day one that this is a place where people pay attention to each other.
When things go wrong
A culture of appreciation isn’t just about celebrating success – it’s equally visible in how you handle difficulty. When something goes wrong, the temptation is to focus entirely on fixing the problem and, implicitly or explicitly, on who’s to blame. But the way you respond in those moments sends a powerful signal about whether your team can afford to be honest with you.
If people know that owning a mistake will be met with a conversation rather than a dressing-down, they’re more likely to come forward early – and early problems are almost always easier to solve. Acknowledging the courage it takes to say “I got that wrong” is itself a form of appreciation. It says: I value your honesty more than I need someone to blame.
This doesn’t mean avoiding accountability. It means building a culture where accountability and appreciation aren’t opposites – where people can be held to a high standard and still feel respected and valued.
The long game
Cultural change is slow, and it rarely follows a straight line. There will be weeks where you’re too stretched to do any of this as well as you’d like, and that’s fine. What matters is the overall pattern over time – whether, looking back over a month or a quarter, the people in your team would say they generally feel seen and appreciated.
One useful habit is to occasionally ask them directly. Not in a formal survey, but in an ordinary conversation: “Do you feel like you get enough feedback from me? Is there anything I could do better in terms of letting you know when things are going well?” Most people will appreciate being asked, and the answers will tell you far more than any process ever could.
A culture of appreciation isn’t a destination you arrive at. It’s a direction you keep choosing, in small ways, every day.
If you would like any further advice on encouraging a culture of appreciation in your workplace, do get in touch.