There is someone on your team you would notice about four hours after they left.
Their name sits on nothing critical. The new starter would still stop getting answers. The small errors would stop being caught before they became complaints. The Friday afternoon problem would land on your desk instead of quietly going away somewhere else.
When did you last say anything to them about it?
Get it right for eleven months and the room stays silent. Get it wrong once and suddenly everybody has half an hour free. That asymmetry is where feeling undervalued at work begins. In the ordinary weeks, where the only feedback available is correction.
Why feeling undervalued at work is a health and safety issue
The standards already treat recognition as a hazard.
ISO 45003, published in 2021 as international guidance on managing psychosocial risk at work, places recognition and reward in its social category of hazards, next to support, supervision and interpersonal relationships.
The regulator’s own tools point the same way. HSE’s Talking Toolkit for line managers, written to help them talk with their teams about the causes of work-related stress, includes a prompt asking employees whether they feel valued.
The scale behind that question is large. HSE’s work-related stress figures for 2024/25 count 964,000 workers in Great Britain whose stress, depression or anxiety was caused or made worse by work. Employers carry a legal duty to assess stress risks and act on what they find, and recognition is one of the hazards that assessment can reasonably cover.
Treating mental health and burnout as safety issues is the wider argument. The narrower question here is whether anybody sees the work.
The work you cannot see is the work you depend on
Your team runs on a layer of effort that never reaches a spreadsheet. Covering. Explaining. Checking. Smoothing over the thing that would otherwise have become an incident, a complaint or a very awkward email.
Take the person who has been carrying a new starter for a month. Answering the same question for the fourth time without sighing. Checking the work before it goes out. Quietly correcting the parts that were not wrong and not making a thing of it.
Their own output has dropped. Obviously it has.
Now picture the performance conversation that follows. You sit them down and ask them to lift their numbers, the same numbers that dropped when you gave them the training job on top of their own.
The figures are accurate. The judgement is nonsense.
Would they carry the same load more easily if they believed somebody could see them under it?
The recognition that is really avoidance
Someone can be praised constantly and still feel worthless. It happens when the praise rewards reliability and ignores whether they were right. When their idea reappears in somebody else’s mouth in a meeting. When “you are brilliant at this” turns out to mean “you are the person we give things to because you say yes to everything”.
Recognition that changes nothing becomes background noise. Given enough time, it becomes an insult.
HSE’s support standard, one of the Management Standards it uses for work-related stress, lists six states employers should achieve. Two of them are regular, constructive feedback and employees knowing how to access the resources their job needs. The first costs a conversation. The second can cost money, time or a decision. Support that costs nothing is only half of support.
Some recognition is genuine. Some of it is paying people in feelings for something that should have cost the business a decision. So ask the uncomfortable version of the question. Am I thanking this person for absorbing a problem I have not fixed?
Covering forty extra hours because the team is two people short is a staffing gap, whatever the thank-you card calls it. You cannot put gratitude on a risk assessment, and nobody has ever taken a day off with it.
Recognition still earns its place. It just makes a poor substitute for a rota, a headcount decision or an honest answer.
What the regulator does about work-related stress
The regulator’s teeth on work-related stress go back more than two decades. In 2003, HSE served an improvement notice on West Dorset General Hospital NHS Trust following stress-related claims among its staff. Two recent cases show how it tests stress arrangements against what happens at work. Both involved a notification of contravention, which HSE’s Fee for Intervention guidance describes as written notice of a material breach of health and safety law.
In April 2025, HSE served one on East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust after an announced visit and staff interviews in September 2024. The Trust’s health and safety report to its board sets out breaches of regulations 3, 4 and 5 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999.
In December 2025, HSE served another on the University of Birmingham, after an inspection that reviewed the organisation’s documentation and interviewed staff across it. The Management Standards are guidance, yet HSE measured the university against the states they describe, and the University and College Union (UCU) branch at Birmingham published the notification.
What HSE found at the University of Birmingham
The university had a stress management policy and risk assessments in place. HSE found the stress risk assessment too generic, the policy not followed in practice, and staff left out of developing the approach. Control measures the university had identified had not been put into effect.
How to find the work you have been missing
Start with a question you are genuinely willing to hear the answer to.
"What part of your job do you think I do not see?"
Then stop talking. The silence will feel long. Sit in it anyway. The first answer is usually the polite one. The real one arrives about ten seconds later, once they have decided whether you meant it.
Launching into how much you value everybody is the sound of a manager closing a conversation they opened by accident.
For more structure, the Talking Toolkit sets out six conversations built around the Management Standards, and HSE advises using it alongside other measures.
Five steps for the conversation
- Ask about the invisible half of the job, the time spent helping, fixing, chasing and holding things together.
- Name the specific thing, for example “Thanks for covering our new starter, I know that costs you an hour a day.” Vague praise can land worse than saying nothing.
- Ask what would help, because some people want acknowledgement and others want credit, a decision or their afternoon back.
- Say what you will change, what you cannot change, and when you will come back, then come back.
- Write down what you found, and if it is a pattern across the team, it belongs in your stress risk assessment
One warning. If you ask the question and then do nothing, you have made things worse than staying silent would have. In regulatory terms, you have a control measure you have written down and left unimplemented. In human terms, you have confirmed exactly what they suspected.
When thanking people is the wrong tool
If you said thank you and nothing changed, thanks was the wrong tool. If the problem is credit, praise for effort is an insult with good manners. If the problem is workload, encouragement is just more weight. Match the response to the complaint in front of you, even when a cheaper answer is available.
Recognition will not cure anxiety, fix a staffing shortage or stand in for occupational health and professional support where those are needed. Used well, it removes one avoidable source of harm and shows you where the others are hiding.
Watch who you hear about least as well as most. Quiet contributors can go unnoticed, and the first clear signal can be a resignation.
The test is whether anything is different six weeks later.
Notice people while it is still going well
At Sevron, workplace safety includes the hazards you will not spot on a safety walk. Identify what can cause harm, find out whether your controls exist anywhere other than on paper, and check whether they worked. Speak to us about bringing recognition into the way you already manage risk.
People rarely leave over one bad review. They leave after a long stretch of feeling interchangeable, and by the time they say it out loud they have usually already gone.
Before your next conversation about targets, ask one person what you have not noticed. Then do something with the answer.
Frequently asked questions
Is feeling undervalued at work a health and safety issue?
Yes. ISO 45003, the international standard on psychological health and safety at work, lists recognition and reward among the psychosocial hazards employers should identify and manage. In Great Britain, the HSE Management Standards cover support, role and relationships, and employers have a duty to assess the risk of work-related stress.
How do I tell my manager I feel undervalued?
Lead with one specific example your manager can picture. Say what you have been doing, what it costs you and what you would like to change. Ask for proper time to discuss it rather than raising it in a corridor, and agree a date to review what was decided.
Should managers thank people for doing their normal job?
Yes, if it is specific. Acknowledging dependable work is useful feedback. Calling every routine task exceptional is how praise stops meaning anything.
What is a psychosocial hazard?
A psychosocial hazard is anything in the way work is organised, in the social side of work, or in the working environment and its tasks that can cause harm to health. ISO 45003 groups them under those three headings, and recognition and reward is one of its social factors.
What if my manager does nothing after I raise it?
Go back to the action you agreed and ask for a straight answer. If nothing moves, take it to another manager, HR or an employee representative. A pattern of being ignored is itself the issue.
Safety & Compliance Experts
The Sevron team brings decades of combined experience in health and safety compliance, risk assessment, and workplace safety solutions.
Reviewed by
Dale Allen
CEO & Founder
