Maya Lin is senior vice president of strategy at Apex Software, a mid-sized company navigating an increasingly competitive market. Known for her sharp analytical mind and relentless execution, Maya spent the last six months overseeing an overhaul of the company’s core inventory platform. The project was make-or-break: a failure would have cost Apex its largest client, which represents nearly 30 percent of annual revenue.

The platform launched on schedule and proved an immediate success. To mark the milestone, Maya hosted an appreciation dinner. During her address, she projected key performance indicators onto a screen, marveling at how a team of their size had engineered a technical overhaul that larger competitors insisted was impossible. “When you step back and look at what we accomplished,” she said, “it is nothing short of extraordinary. I am profoundly grateful to be part of an organization capable of this kind of excellence.” She handed out financial bonuses to the lead software engineers and concluded her remarks by thanking “everyone across the entire company whose dedication brought this vision to life.”

The following afternoon, Daniel Ross, a long-tenured director of client services, stopped by Maya’s office. Daniel had worked alongside Maya throughout the rollout and had witnessed what happened behind the numbers. During the rocky fi rst week of launch, when hidden bugs threatened client trust, Daniel’s team—led by junior operations analyst Chloe Vance—had quietly absorbed the crisis. Chloe and her team spent nights and weekends manually auditing files and conducting unscripted, emotionally draining calls with anxious client representatives. None of this labor was captured in software commits, project velocity charts, or formal job descriptions.

“Maya, the presentation last night was inspiring,” Daniel said. “You could really feel how much this win meant to you.” Taking a seat, he continued, “I did want to bring up Chloe Vance and her team. The automated metrics make the rollout look seamless, but the only reason we didn’t lose the account during week one was because Chloe’s team worked 80-hour weeks keeping clients calm and fixing data errors by hand.”

Maya smiled warmly. “I know it was intense, Daniel, and I truly am grateful for their hard work. That’s why I made sure to include a sincere thank-you to the broader team in my speech: to ensure everyone received recognition for their herculean efforts.”

“A general thank-you is fine,” Daniel replied gently, “but Chloe and her team put their personal lives on hold to pull us across the finish line out of genuine care for our clients and our reputation. When that kind of sacrifice gets wrapped into a general thank-you, it can feel less like an acknowledgment of their personal gift and more like treating their extra labor as baseline duty.”

Maya paused, considering his words before responding thoughtfully. “Daniel, I genuinely marvel at what we’ve accomplished here, and I don’t take any of it for granted. The software engineers built the underlying foundation that made this success possible, which is why I recognized them specifically last night. I know the operations team also did their jobs during a crunch period, and they’ll be compensated for overtime and recognized during performance reviews. In a business like ours, we honor contributions through fair compensation, celebrate the big wins together, and then keep pushing to hit our next goal.”

Daniel thanked her for her time and left the office. Over the next few weeks, he observed that Chloe and her team had returned to their routine duties with a slight but noticeable detachment—leaving him to wonder whether the company’s way of expressing gratitude was adequately felt by the workers whose interconnected web of labor sustains it.