Recognition That Reaches: How to See Your People Across Difference

A case study on Unilever and why recognition has to be built into the system and not left to memory.

Picture a Monday morning huddle. A manager stands up and praises the team member who closed a big client deal last week. Applause, a few claps on the back, the meeting moves on.

Meanwhile, in that same room:

• The person who quietly caught a costly error in a report before it went out gets no mention.

• The one who has been steadily mentoring two junior colleagues without being asked gets no mention.

• The one who has shown up early every day for a month to support a teammate through a hard patch gets no mention.

At face value it might look like the manager does not value them. But what's actually happening is the recognition mechanism, left unmanaged, is flowing towards whoever is loudest, most visible, or most similar to the manager doing the recognising.

Less of a personality flaw, and more of what happens when recognition is left as an instinct rather than built as a system.

Recognition Goes Beyond Compliments

The scale of the problem is larger than most managers assume. 91% of organisations have rewards programmes and 94% have recognition programmes, yet only 31% rate their programme's effectiveness as high or very high. It seems that simply implementing a programme does not guarantee a system that truly addresses the needs of everyone present in the team.

However there is massive upside when the system does work. Employees who feel truly recognised for their work are 5 times more likely to feel connected to company culture and 4 times more likely to be engaged at work. Employees who feel appreciated are 56% less likely to leave their jobs and 73% less likely to feel burned out. Recognition is not a soft add-on to management. It is one of the more reliable levers a manager has for retention and burnout prevention, provided it reaches the people who actually need it.

What Unilever Built

Unilever operates in more than 190 markets, employing people across enormously different cultural, generational, and professional contexts. By the mid-2010s, the company had achieved real diversity at scale, and by most accounts recognised that diversity without a system behind it risks producing division rather than performance.

What stands out about Unilever's approach is that inclusion was not treated as an annual training event. Reporting on the company describes it becoming a standing item in leadership accountability reviews, with one of the more effective mechanisms being an expanded reverse mentoring programme, strategically pairing senior executives with junior employees to educate leadership on contemporary workplace issues including generational differences, digital burnout, and intersectionality. The intent, from what has been documented, was not mentorship in the traditional sense. It was designed to give senior leaders a structured, repeated way to see what they would otherwise miss entirely.

Leaders were reportedly coached to routinely ask themselves two questions: whose voice isn't in this conversation, and what assumptions might I be making. It is a habit worth admiring, that kind of consistent self-interrogation at a senior level is often what actually shifts a culture, more than any single policy. Unilever also built Regional Inclusion Councils, decentralised local teams that translated the company's global inclusion goals into approaches suited to each specific market, rather than imposing one standard everywhere and hoping it landed the same way in every context. The outcome speaks for itself: significant growth in leadership diversity between 2022 and 2024, the kind of result that structure tends to produce where good intentions alone usually fall short.

The blind spot most recognition systems miss

Recognition preferences are not evenly distributed across a team, and they are not static. Gen Z and Millennial employees tend to prefer frequent feedback and experience-based recognition, while older colleagues often respond better to formal praise or material acknowledgement. Nearly four in ten of your youngest team members want recognition from their manager multiple times a week, yet only around a quarter actually receive it at that frequency.

In South Africa, the data holds a genuine surprise. YouGov Profiles+ South Africa research found that job satisfaction is broadly consistent across Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z, and that the real differences show up in how each generation expects to be seen and rewarded, not in whether they enjoy their work. The same research flags something managers rarely think to look for: career anxiety among South Africa's most established professional cohort is a quiet retention risk, with recognition and visible career trajectories past 45 mattering more than most organisations realise. Most recognition conversations focus on keeping younger talent engaged. The Gen X manager who has been reliably excellent for a decade is often the person nobody thinks to recognise at all.

Building recognition as a system, not a memory test

Even the most attentive leader can't reliably catch every contribution worth recognising on memory alone, particularly across a genuinely diverse team, where people signal value differently and expect to be seen differently. The Unilever case points to three structural shifts worth building into how you manage, not just how you feel.

Make recognition a standing agenda item, not a spontaneous impulse

Unilever reviewed inclusion progress at the leadership level on a set cadence rather than leaving it to chance. You do not need a global council to borrow the principle. Before your next team or one-to-one cycle, build in a standing moment where you deliberately ask yourself who has contributed meaningfully in the past week or month that you have not yet acknowledged.

• Add a five-minute recurring item to your own weekly planning: who did strong, quiet work this week that I have not mentioned?

• Keep a running list. Memory is unreliable under pressure, and the people most likely to be missed are the ones who do not remind you.

Ask whose voice is missing before you decide who gets seen

Borrow Unilever's habit directly. Before recognising a contribution publicly or deciding who gets the next big opportunity, ask yourself whose voice is not in this conversation, and what assumption you might be making about why. This single question interrupts the tendency to recognise people who remind you of yourself.

• Before your next round of recognition or opportunity allocation, name one person on your team whose contribution style is least like your own, and check whether they have been seen recently.

• If you cannot answer that question confidently, that is the gap to close first.

Let recognition adapt locally without lowering the standard

Unilever's Regional Inclusion Councils translated one global standard into locally relevant practice. You can do a version of this inside your own team. The standard, that everyone's contribution gets seen and named, stays fixed. How that happens for each person, publicly or privately, immediately or in writing, formally or informally, flexes to fit them.

• Do not assume the form of recognition that worked for your last team member will land the same way with the next one.

• Treat the format of recognition as negotiable and the commitment to give it as non-negotiable.

The system is the point

Unilever's leaders did not simply get better at complimenting people. They built structures that made it far harder for good work to go unseen, and far easier to notice the blind spots created by their own position and preferences.

That is the shift worth making. Recognition that depends entirely on a manager's memory and instinct will always favour the people who are loudest, most visible, or most like the person in charge. Recognition that is built into a system reaches everyone else too.

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If your organisation wants to build recognition and inclusion practices that hold up across a genuinely diverse team, 54TwentyFour supports leaders through coaching, facilitated sessions, and leadership development designed for the South African professional context.