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Ask HN: I want to praise an employee to an employer. Any tips?
35 points by escape_goat on Oct 9, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments
I want to praise an employee to an employer. The employee is a location manager. Due to the nature of my problem, I ended up listening to the employee manage that location for about six hours over three days, which is a fairly unusual customer experience.

I am fairly confident that this employee is known by name several tiers of management upwards for exactly the traits I would like to point out, but I would like to remind them of that yet again. This is one of those people who you sure can pay, but you can't get the value that they contribute just by paying someone enough money. Sort of like the 1000x developer, in a different industry.

Any tips? Any dos or don'ts? I don't need to deal with companies or workplaces in my regular life and am pretty gormless.




Approach the employee and let them know you'd like to praise them to their management for reasons x, y, and z. Ask them if that would be okay, and if so, can they provide relevant contact info.

The reason for asking is that the praise that you want to offer may not be in line with their career goals (e.g. if you're praising their management style, decisions, etc but they want to move toward development or support or something). This also gives you an opportunity to communicate the praise directly to them.


I'd go further and consider just complimenting the person face-to-face and leave it at that. Help them understand their true value and that they should make sure they're not undervaluing themselves in terms of compensation or satisfaction.

That level of employee is either already recognized or they have idiots for managers. Praising them to an idiot boss probably just causes them more problems (jealousy for one or some point of praise gets twisted as them not following protocol -- maybe a report was late because they spent "too much" time with customers). If you go ahead, I agree with another commenter who said direct the feedback as high as possible to prevent jealousy or other backfire.

I'd agree with the manager approach if the person was so low level that it would be easy for their contribution to be missed.


When I'm complimented by a client verbally, I politely give them my manager's email address and ask them to forward that information on. I find that I've gotten a number of compliments that I compile for my yearly performance review. I like my client and my manager, and while it may not affect my compensation (I get regular, small increases), it seems to keep negative micro-management from affecting my day-to-day work, and feeds the cycle of positive feedback that allows me to do interesting work, instead of defending how my hours are spent.

I'd encourage positive communication between clients and managers. My dad had a lot of good things to say about his military service. One of them was cultural: tell the guy what he could do better. Tell his superior what he's done well.


This is critical. Worse still, they might be trying to not be a squeaky wheel for any number of reasons. Giving them attention from higher-ups might not be so positive in their eyes.


I make it a habit, when I have an above-and-beyond customer experience, to reach out to superiors of whoever helped me to praise them.

This most often happens in hotels where a particular day-to-day employee is extremely helpful or thoughtful. Upon checking out, I will call the hotel and ask to speak to the GM. Ironically this is the hardest step, because most people who ask for the GM have something to complain about, and then I tell my story once on the line.

In the same vain, I think it should be pretty easy to reach out to somebody more senior than and in the same chain-of-command as this person - find out the name of their boss' boss on LinkedIn or something, then guess that person's email address (it probably has the same format as this employee), etc.


Send a letter to the CEO saying something like “FYI, you should really hang onto $PERSON. They help me with $THING. I’m telling all my friends about $COMPANY. I thought you should know, too.” For extra impact, write it by hand.


I like this post by Julia Evans: https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/07/14/when-your-coworker-does-grea...


Write a letter by hand and address it to the CEO of the company. It'll have much more of an impact and will definitely reach the ears of the employee you recommend as well. I heard of this happening a number of times in Royal Caribbean where a staff member went above and beyond, a family member was working there and received a number of these types of letters; apparently they went straight into the employee's file and definitely impacted their promotion opportunities (in a good way).


If I were in your shoes, I'd aim for maximum effect - find the person(s) at the highest tier of management who can appreciate the value this employee contributes, and who can do something about it; and emphasize how "priceless" such an employee is to the company and their clients.

It's something we need more in society, people like you doing a good deed for a good person. I hope the company is smart enough to acknowledge and foster it.


Honestly the one piece of advice I can give is make sure you follow through and actually do something about it. Even if your message goes through to the wrong person they will almost certainly redirect it internally so it gets heard, so don't be put off.

Given the asymmetric nature of feedback (people are much more likely to contact you to complain than to praise) I absolutely love it when I get positive feedback about people in my team from clients etc, and it often helps provide evidence for me to justify an unusually fast promotion, salary bump etc.


I'd say almost any approach may be appreciated, but it may have more of an impact on you than that person. It just really depends on the vibe of the company.

Years ago, I'd done phone calls to companies, asking for a manager (shift, dept, store, regional, whatever), and almost always they were... somewhat agitated/defensive. I expect 99% of phone calls they get were people calling to complain. I'd say something like "I dealt with person XYZ the other day and... they were phenomenal. This was some of the best service/care/etc I've had. You keep that person and/or get more people like them and you've got a customer for life". That sort of thing. In one case, the person said "ok, thanks." and that was it. In most other cases the person was generally pleasantly surprised to hear good news. Looking back, I'm pretty sure a written letter or email would possibly have done more 'good' for the person in some respects, but having a pleasant/positive conversation with someone talking up good points about another person was, for me, a positive experience in itself.


Offtopic, but it is heartening to see that in the kind of world we live in today, there are some people who first of all recognise the value provided by someone, then they want to appreciate them, then they put in the effort to think how should they do it to the extent that they ask for suggestions for it on a public forum.

Good on you escape_goat.


Send something to the team and name the person in the note.


If you are in contact with the person ask them for their managers email address or contract information and email them.


Twitter, linkedin, send the individual a letter of commendation themselves to put in their resume.


Hasn't this been on HN for the past week at least?


This is a really great question.


I agree, its something that should be encouraged. I guess its the business world equivalent of tipping someone.




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