Why Gratitude is Crucial for Growth

Trackforce

November 27, 2015 · 12 min read

Security business team showing gratitude to support company growth

Thanksgiving is the time when we sit down with our families and take stock of what we are grateful for in our lives. Typically, people think of what they’re grateful for in their personal lives, but it’s also important to show gratitude for your employees, customers, and other professional connections that go above and beyond for you.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with expecting excellence. We encourage owners at security firms to expect excellence from their security officers and then hold them to high standards, but that doesn’t mean you should take it for granted when they meet those standards by exhibiting excellence, thoughtfulness, and kindness.

Key takeaways

Gratitude is a habit, not a December activity.
Gift cards and stock-phrase holiday cards are stunts. Recognition that lands is specific, timely and repeated.
The broken tile test is the whole idea.
If you only ever comment on the one report with a typo, your best officers learn that good work is invisible and only mistakes get attention.
You cannot recognise what you never see.
Most managers are not ungrateful, they simply have no record of who did the work well. Exceptions surface automatically; excellence usually does not.
Specific beats sincere.
“Great job this month” costs nothing and means nothing. Naming the site, the shift and the number is what an officer repeats to their family.
This is a retention lever, not a soft one.
People leave posts where good work goes unremarked, and replacing an officer costs far more than noticing one.

What is gratitude?

First, here is a list of things that gratitude is not.

10% of holiday sales to loyal customers
iTunes gift cards for employees
Christmas cards with the same stock phrase

All that is holiday stunts. We’re talking about genuine, human gratitude for the customers, employees, and vendors that sustain your business. This is about taking the time to recognize that everything you do would be impossible without all these people, and letting them know how much you appreciate their contribution.

Most importantly, gratitude is a habit, not an action. Practicing genuine gratitude means focusing on the positives and not taking them for granted whenever they happen.

The broken tile test

One good way to think about practicing gratitude is something I call the “Broken Tile” test. What it really boils down to is whether or not you fixate on the negatives. When you walk into a beautiful restaurant with great food, is your attention drawn to the one broken tile on the floor? When one of your officers always turns in great reports, do you only comment on the one with a typo?

It’s easy to fixate on the problems and mistakes, especially because as an owner it’s usually your job to fix them. Unfortunately, only pointing out the negatives is a recipe for making people feel unappreciated.

There is also a structural reason this happens, and it is worth naming. Most operations are built to surface exceptions. A missed checkpoint raises an alert; a hundred completed ones raise nothing. So the manager is not being ungrateful, they are responding to the only information that reaches them. Fixing the habit usually means changing what you look at, not just how you feel about it.

We have a tendency to try to compartmentalize our personal and professional lives, but it just doesn’t work that way. What happens to you on a professional level impacts your emotional well being. Employees and customers don’t stop being human beings just because they come into the store or office, and they still have the basic human cravings for appreciation and acceptance.

Gratitude can be selfish

We have a tendency to think of gratitude as being “selfless”, but the truth is that practicing gratitude on a regular basis can be very beneficial to the bottom line.

I think of a quote from Dr. Christiane Northrup: “Feeling grateful or appreciative of someone or something in your life actually attracts more of the things that you appreciate and value into your life.”

Showing gratitude when customers choose your business encourages them to come back. Recognizing when your employees go above and beyond makes them want to keep exceeding expectations.

Think about times when you were around someone who had a genuine attitude of gratitude. It felt great, didn’t it? Now think about how it impacts your life when you adopt that same attitude.

You feel absolutely awesome.
People around you feel awesome.
People are motivated to do more of the same things that inspired gratitude in the first place.
You will feel inspired to grow, reach, and do.
You begin to become keenly aware of other things to be grateful for.
You feel and show respect for purpose, people and position.

Fill a need

Businesses exist to fill a need. We tend to think of that role simply in the context of the product or service that helps out a customer, but it can go beyond that. Businesses also fill the need for employees to have stable jobs, and for communities to have strong institutions.

Why not go one step further, and have your business fill the need people have to feel appreciated and accepted? As we discussed in “Why Do Good Security Guards Quit?”, not addressing that need can result in higher turnover. People want to be around gratitude, and if it’s not forthcoming from you, they’ll have no problem with moving on the first chance they get.

If you want to retain employees, develop customer loyalty, and work with quality people, then try to get away from just being grateful one day out of the year and focus on the positives year round.

You cannot recognise what you never see

Here is the practical problem with the broken tile test. Most managers pass it in principle and fail it in practice, because the only thing that reaches their desk is the exception. Nobody sends you a notification when an officer completes a tour correctly for the ninetieth time.

That is worth fixing, because vague praise does almost nothing. “Great work this month” is forgotten by the car park. What an officer actually repeats at home is the version with a detail in it, and details come from having a record. Here is what is worth recognising and where you would find it:

The thing worth recognising	Where you would actually see it	What specific recognition sounds like
An officer who completes every checkpoint, every shift, for months	Tour completion history by officer and site	“You have not missed a checkpoint at Riverside since March. That is why the client renewed.”
Reports that need no editing before a client sees them	Incident reports that pass straight through without supervisor rework	“Your reports go out exactly as you write them. Nobody else’s do.”
An incident caught early, before it became a claim	Time between first observation and escalation	“You flagged the loading bay door two weeks before anything happened.”
Picking up a shift at short notice	Coverage records and who filled the gap	“You have covered four short-notice shifts this quarter. I noticed, and here is what it saved us.”
Handling a difficult post without escalation	Low incident volume at a site with a known history	“That site used to generate weekly complaints. It has been quiet since you took it.”
Long service at a post nobody else wants	Assignment history and tenure by site	“Eighteen months on nights at the plant. That is the hardest post we have.”

None of the right-hand column requires software, strictly speaking. A manager with a clipboard and a very good memory could do it. But at twenty sites and two hundred officers, guard management and reporting are what make the middle column exist at all, and people management is where tenure and assignment history live.

Why most recognition falls flat

It is generic. Praise that could apply to anyone on the roster reads as a formality, because it is one.
It is late. Recognition three months after the shift feels like an audit finding. Same week or it barely counts.
It only goes to the visible people. Day-shift officers at head-office sites get noticed. The person on nights at the plant does the hardest post and sees a supervisor least.
It arrives attached to a correction. “Good work on the reports, but” deletes everything before the comma.
It never reaches the client. Passing a client’s compliment back to the officer who earned it is free and lands harder than anything you say yourself.
It stops when things get busy. Which is exactly when people are working hardest and most likely to notice the silence.

Build the habit in 30 days

Week 1: look at completions, not just exceptions. Spend five minutes on who did everything right rather than only what went wrong. If your dashboard only shows you problems, change the view.
Week 1: find your quiet performers. Sort by tour completion and report quality rather than by incident volume. The names that come up are often people you have not spoken to in months.
Week 2: say one specific thing to three people. Name the site, the shift and the number. Do not attach a correction to it.
Week 3: route client compliments back to the officer. Make it someone’s actual job, because otherwise it lives in an inbox and dies there.
Week 4: put it in the calendar. A recurring fifteen minutes beats good intentions. Gratitude as a habit means it survives a bad month, which is the only real test of it.

None of this replaces paying people properly or fixing a difficult post. But of all the retention levers available to an owner, noticing good work is the cheapest, and the one most often left unused. If you want to see the record that makes specific recognition possible across a whole operation, you can read how the evidence layer works or book a TrackTik demo and look at your own sites.

Frequently Asked Questions

It is a way of checking whether you fixate on the negative. Walk into a beautiful restaurant with great food, and is your attention drawn to the one cracked tile on the floor? Applied to an operation: when an officer files excellent reports for months, do you only ever comment on the one with a typo? Most managers fail this not from ingratitude but because exceptions are the only thing that reaches them.

It is one of the cheaper levers available, and it matters most in an industry where people can leave for a similar wage elsewhere. Recognition does not substitute for pay or for fixing a genuinely bad post, but the absence of it is a common reason good officers move on. Our piece on why good guards quit covers the wider picture.

Specificity, timing, and no attached correction. “Great job this month” is a formality. “You have not missed a checkpoint at Riverside since March, and that is why the client renewed” is something an officer repeats at home. Say it the same week, and never follow it with “but”, because everything before the comma gets deleted.

This is the real problem at scale, and it is why the night-shift officer at the difficult site is usually the least thanked person on the roster despite having the hardest job. You need a record rather than a memory: tour completion, report quality and assignment history per officer. Guard management data is what lets a supervisor name a specific achievement for someone they have not stood next to in a month.

Sort by the positive rather than the negative. Most operations rank by incident count or complaints, which surfaces problems and hides excellence. Sorting by completed tours, reports that needed no rework, and early escalations gives you a different and more useful list. Reporting that lets you build that view yourself is the difference between knowing and guessing.

Yes, and it costs nothing. When a client compliments an officer, passing that back verbatim lands harder than anything you say internally, because it comes from the person the officer is actually serving. Make routing those compliments someone’s explicit job, otherwise they sit in an inbox. It also quietly reinforces to the client that they are dealing with a firm that pays attention.

Both. The commercial case is straightforward: recognised officers stay longer, retention reduces recruitment and onboarding cost, and experienced officers at a site generate fewer client complaints. Practising it well does require knowing what happened, which is where an operational record helps. You can book a TrackTik demo if you want to see what that looks like across multiple sites.