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and valued.The Need for GratitudeEven under the best of circumstances, people yearn to receive gratitude from their bosses. In a survey of 2,000 employees, 70% reported that they would feel better about themselves if their boss were more grateful, and 81% said that they would work harder for a grateful boss. This research also shows a %u201cgratitude gap%u201d: While employees wish for more gratitude at work (a place where most of us spend nearly a third of our lives), they are more likely to receive gratitude almost anywhere else. Genuine gratitude at work is surprisingly rare, especially from those in power, and when times are tough.Despite this, the importance of expressing and receiving gratitude in the workplace is evident, and some companies have endeavored to cultivate a culture of gratitude. This has included efforts like launching Slack channels dedicated to #gratitude or #kudos, and other workplace mechanisms to encourage inter-employee gratitude for helpful actions that they%u2019ve taken to further the goals of the business.According to our research, however, thanking people after they engage in their tasks does not provoke the same resilience and perseverance as expressing gratitude before the task begins.In our initial study, we set out to explore the emotions that employees experience in high-stress work environments. After examining four years of employee emails and then interviewing employees at a top hospital%u2019s ICUs, we found that many employees expressed gratitude before a colleague took on a challenging task or shift, and that when they did so it helped the colleague feel more socially connected and purposeful %u2014 and be more resili-