Can Practising Gratitude at Work Actually Make You Better at Your Job?

By Matt Hughes · 2026-07-09 · 7 min read

It sounded like a laminated poster next to the kettle — until I actually tested it running my own business. What gratitude at work really does, and the research behind it.

I resisted the idea of practising gratitude at work for years, mostly because it sounded like something a middle manager would put on a laminated poster next to the kettle. Be grateful for your job! Positive vibes only! It made my teeth itch. But I run my own consultancy and I built a gratitude app, so eventually I had to be honest with myself and actually test whether any of it holds up in the one place I spend most of my waking life. This is what I found — including the bits that didn't work.

The short version: gratitude at work isn't about being grateful for your job. It's a fix for a specific, measurable glitch in how your brain records your working week. Once I stopped treating it as forced positivity and started treating it as a correction, it earned its place.

Why does a good week at work still feel like a bad one?

Here's the thing that finally sold me. You can have a genuinely good week — a project ships, a client says something kind, you unpick a problem that had been sitting on your chest for a fortnight — and still drive home on Friday with a low hum of having somehow not done enough. One clumsy email, one meeting where you didn't say the clever thing until the walk afterwards, and that's the bit that loops.

This isn't you being neurotic. It's a well-documented bias. In 2001 a group of psychologists led by Roy Baumeister published a paper with the wonderfully blunt title "Bad Is Stronger Than Good", reviewing decades of evidence that negative events hit us harder and linger longer than positive ones of the same size. A single sharp comment outweighs several genuine compliments. Losing £50 stings more than finding £50 delights. Your brain built this bias for good evolutionary reasons — the ancestor who obsessed over the rustle in the grass outlived the one who savoured the sunset — but at work, in an office or on a laptop, it quietly libels your entire week.

The same paper offers the way out, almost as an aside: good can still win, but only by force of numbers. Enough small positives, actually registered, can outweigh the one loud negative. The catch is the "actually registered" part. Left alone, your brain doesn't file the good stuff. You have to make it.

Does gratitude at work actually improve performance?

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where these articles usually oversell. Writing down three good things is not going to make you better at spreadsheets, or turn a mediocre strategist into a sharp one. Anyone promising that is selling you a mug.

What it does do is subtler and, I think, more useful. The psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has spent years on a theory she calls "broaden and build": stress and fear narrow your attention down to the threat, which is exactly what you want if there's a lion and exactly what you don't want when you're trying to think creatively about a client problem. Positive emotions do the opposite — they widen the aperture, so you notice more options, make odder and better connections, and are generally more use in a room. Chronic low-grade work stress keeps you stuck on the narrow setting. Deliberately noticing what's going right is one of the cheapest ways I know to nudge yourself back out of it.

So no, gratitude didn't raise my IQ. But in the weeks I did it, I noticed I was less reactive, quicker to see a second option instead of defending the first one, and markedly less likely to fire off the email I'd regret. For knowledge work, that's not nothing. That's most of the job.

What about saying thank you to other people?

This was the part that genuinely surprised me, because I'm a founder and I am, by default, rubbish at it. Heads down, next problem, forget to tell anyone they did well. Then I read the Grant and Gino study and felt appropriately called out.

In 2010 Adam Grant and Francesca Gino ran an experiment with university fundraisers — the people who ring alumni asking for donations, a proper grind of a job. One group had a director visit and simply tell them she was grateful for their hard work and that their contribution was genuinely valued. That was it. No bonus, no pizza. Over the following week, that group made around 50% more calls than the group who hadn't been thanked. Fifty per cent, from one sincere sentence. And when the researchers dug into why, it wasn't that people felt more capable — it was that they felt more valued. They mattered to someone, so they showed up harder.

I think about that number a lot. As a manager or a founder, gratitude is close to the highest-return, lowest-cost thing you can do, and most of us — me very much included — ration it as though it were expensive. It costs nothing. Say the thing.

How do you practise gratitude at work without being the office weirdo?

You don't need to announce it, journal in the open-plan, or start meetings with a round of appreciations that makes everyone want to walk into the sea. My whole practice is private and takes about ninety seconds at the end of the working day, before I close the laptop.

I write down three things that went right that day, and — this is the only rule that matters — they have to be specific to that day. Not "grateful for my clients", which is wallpaper, but "the way Sarah caught the error in the model before it reached the client, and how relieved I was". Not "grateful for my work", but "the ten minutes where the messy problem suddenly went quiet and I could see the shape of it". Specific things are the ones your brain will actually re-file. Generic things it ignores, the same way it ignores the twentieth "have a great day".

Once a week — usually a Friday — I read back over the entries before I let myself decide how the week went. This is the bit that does the real work. Left to my gut, Friday-me rates the whole week on its worst moment. Reading five days of specifics, I get an accurate count instead of a dramatic one, and the week is almost always better than the story I was about to tell about it. That gap, between the felt week and the recorded week, is the entire point. I built Kansha partly so that read-back happens without me having to organise anything, but a notebook does the job just as well.

When does gratitude at work not work?

Here's where I have to be honest, because the laminated-poster version of this skips it entirely. Gratitude is not a fix for a genuinely bad job. If you're underpaid, managed by someone careless with people, or grinding through work that's quietly hollowing you out, no amount of noticing three good things will fix that — and using it to talk yourself out of leaving is one of the more expensive mistakes you can make. That isn't gratitude, it's anaesthetic.

The tell, for me, is whether the practice makes me see my work more clearly or less. On a normal week, reading back reminds me of good things I'd genuinely undercounted — that's it working. In the run-up to ending a client relationship that had gone sour, I noticed I was straining to fill the three lines, reaching for scraps. That straining was information. The point of the practice is to correct a bias towards the negative, not to override accurate signals that something needs to change. If you find yourself using gratitude to argue yourself out of feelings that keep coming back, listen to the feelings.

It also doesn't survive being forced during a genuinely brutal patch. The week a deal collapsed and I let two people down, sitting there manufacturing gratitude would have been a small lie, and I'd have known it. So I skipped it. Named the bad thing instead, and came back to the practice when there was something true to write. Gratitude at work has to stay honest or it's worthless — same as everywhere else.

So is it worth it?

For me, yes — with the caveats intact. Not as a productivity hack, not as a way to feel fine about a job you should leave, but as a cheap, private correction to a brain that is genuinely, measurably bad at remembering what went right. I finish most weeks now with an accurate account of what I actually did, instead of a highlight reel of everything I fumbled. That alone has made me calmer, a bit braver about the hard decisions, and considerably better to work with. And every so often it reminds me to turn round and tell someone on my team that they did well — which, going on the evidence, might be the most productive ninety seconds of my week.