I think this statistic is neither surprising nor problematic. Would you really expect more than 36% of the workforce to be frequently deserving of recognition? The job of management is not to give lip-service praise to all their employees.
I disagree -- if an employee is providing an indispensable contribution to the company, you need to be recognizing and praising them, or sooner or later they are going to stop contributing at a high level or jump to another opportunity.
And if an employee isn't providing an indispensable contribution, why are you still employing them? If 64% of your workforce isn't providing any value worth recognizing, your workforce is far too large.
Personally, I'm surprised that the 64% number is so low.
My calling, system administration, is definitely one where, the better I do my job, the less visible my work is, but it's easy to forget this is not the case for everyone else.
