The people who decide whether your work gets noticed are not always the people managing you directly

Employees tend to believe that the first person who determines if their contribution will be noticed is their immediate supervisor. However, while this may sometimes be true within smaller teams, in bigger firms, in project-oriented settings, or in matrix environments, visibility is dependent on multiple individuals besides the official chain of command. The project manager, senior partner, executive sponsor, and other influential colleagues have an important say in deciding which contributions will come to the notice of management and which will be hidden in execution tasks.

The difference is important because employees conflate access to work with visibility for work. Being productive in the execution of meaningful tasks does not necessarily equate to an understanding by those in power of the accomplishment and the reasons for its success. Communication in organizations tends to flow from bottom up via summarization, presentation, and discussion within various stakeholder groups. Some level of translation is always needed before the achievement is seen in organizational terms. This point is made by studies from the Harvard Business Review on the dynamics of workplace social networks. Opportunities and influence often flow through non-formal channels rather than formal reporting relationships only. That is not to say recognition is superficial or entirely political. It simply implies that visibility partially involves legibility of contributions to those tasked with communication across units and organizational hierarchy. Employees find this surprising because they assume meaningful work will make itself visible without fail. Sometimes this happens. More often not.

Recognition depends partly on how work travels through the organization

Another reason why employees may misunderstand visibility in the workplace is that the process of recognizing people is less visible than the process of evaluating their performance. The work can be accomplished effectively, but for the rest of the organization to experience it, it would be through presentations, summaries, updates from management, or discussions among executives outside the context of their actual work. According to Gallup and Workhuman’s findings, recognition of people significantly affects employee turnover and employee development. However, when employees do not understand the recognition process, they tend to assume that it is either all about merit or entirely arbitrary.

The key point is that recognition comes through distribution channels. Someone interprets the contribution, highlights its significance, or pushes for the importance of the contribution from above. Those employees who grasp this concept will not be focused only on achieving results; rather, they will also make sure the appropriate stakeholders know what value was placed on the results. The findings about favoritism by Gallup apply here, too, since employees feel negatively about any recognition that seems unclear or distributed inconsistently. Some of the time, there really is favoritism involved. However, other times, it is just the case that the system itself is invisible to everyone outside certain information channels. This point is crucial because employees who see every information gap as political might get caught up in unnecessary cynicism.

Employees benefit from understanding who sees the work after it is finished

A more useful response lies beyond self-promotion and continuous visibility management. Instead, an organization can learn from understanding what happens to its work after it has been completed. It is important for employees to know whose attention the various results need, and through whom the impact of this work is communicated up the hierarchy. As per the information presented by the article’s source, one needs to ask a very direct question: “Who else, apart from you, needs to understand the impact of this work?”

It is true that some organizations may have become too complicated for one manager to control all the recognition processes entirely. The role of visibility is often tied not just with performance but also with networking, interpretation, advocacy, and storytelling within organizations. Good work continues to count for a lot, but in many cases, those who decide if a work will be noticed do not always assign it themselves.