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Almost half of U.S. workers say their boss doesn’t fully understand what they contribute.
That’s according to the 2025 “Workplace Perception Gap $GPS Survey” by the software and analytics provider The Predictive Index.
The consequence of this is that workers tend to feel undervalued. Maybe they’re not recognized for their contributions, or feel as if they’re passed over for promotions on account of superiors not understanding the value a particular person might provide, which is more common when there’s role ambiguity.
For example, it’s relatively straightforward to quantify how your sales team is performing when measuring the same metrics week over week, quarter over quarter, and year over year. Much more role ambiguity might exist with a corporate communications manager, who may juggle internal messaging, brand reputation, and press releases.
Sometimes managers might struggle to explain why a specific job matters or be able to define what “doing a good job” looks like. Without that clarity, they can’t ask the right questions, or measure the right things — none of which is good for morale.
Karim Adib, public relations manager at AI search engine optimization automation firm Search Atlas, remembers feeling like it was hard to know whether he was doing a good job. His work achievements often went unacknowledged.
“It felt like you’d achieve a milestone and you wouldn’t be appreciated for it, but the moment you stop working towards that milestone, because you don’t feel like it’s valuable to the business, you are told you’ve stopped working hard,” Adib said.
Adib works hard today as a manager to ensure his team doesn’t feel that way, but he recognizes that he’s human and capable of having blind spots, making it important to have systems in place to prevent managers from failing to acknowledge a team member’s success.
His top three tips for this are as follow:
“I think it’s really important for employees to know whether they’re doing well or not,” Adib said. “I’m not just going to leave it up to chance.”
“It's practically impossible to have an environment where you encourage people if people are scared to even understand what they need to do,” he said. “So you need to make sure that your employees can come to you and ask you anything, because it ensures communication is super clear through your company.”
“I really take the opportunity to make sure people feel appreciated for what they’ve done and to also make sure to hear out any problems or struggles they are facing to avoid issues early on,” Adib said.
Peter Murphy had similar experiences.
“I have been across both of those gaps,” said Murphy, founder and CEO of Track Spikes, a Wyoming-based maker of track-and-field shoes for athletes.
“I have worked in jobs where nobody really knew what I was doing, and it exhausted me,” he said. “You begin to doubt yourself, not that you are not performing, but that no one is paying attention to what is working.”
Murphy said he works hard to protect employees from feeling invisible.
“We are a lean team and visibility counts,” he said. “Each part has distinct metrics based on the results we all follow collectively. It could be the number of fewer cart abandonments, better fulfillment time, or higher (customer) retention.”
Murphy encourages his managers to learn how the work is done so they can give specific feedback to their team members.
“It’s not merely a ‘Great job,’ but ‘I noticed how you sorted out that messy process, and then it saved us hours,’” Murphy said.
Benjamin Ellis, CEO of U.K.-based software firm SocialOptic, also cautions people to think about the correlation between “liking” and “performing.”
“If a manager likes an employee as an individual, then they tend to rate them more highly in performance evaluations,” Ellis said. “Of course, that can be a two-way street. If an employee is consistently underperforming and causing problems as a manager, then it is obvious they will like the employee less.”
The same can even be true in ‘360’-style evaluations, he said.
“If people have a strong social bond, or familiarity with an employee, they will tend to rate them as more competent,” Ellis said. “Peer reviews can turn into a popularity contest, if they aren’t designed and conducted carefully.”
There are two important components of performance assessment, he said: First, that the manager or whoever is doing the assessment has the skills to properly assess that particular job performance, which is a challenge when managers do a different job than those they’re assessing, and second, that the evaluation isn’t biased.
“Great evaluations cover both of these points,” Ellis said.
