Interesting Difference of Definition

At work we are in the middle of an employee survey created by Gallup. Gallup is a 'vendor' that has that has collated 12 measures via 12 questions. These questions and respective measures show employee engagement and link directly to critical performance outcomes, including productivity, employee retention, customer retention, safety, and profitability. The following are a list of those 12 measures:

I know what is expected of me at work.
I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
There is someone at work who encourages my development.
At work, my opinions seem to count.
The mission or purpose of my organization makes me feel my job is important.
My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
I have a best friend at work.
In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

On my team we had ‘recognition’ very low in our overall score. After a discussion with my group(consisting of 30-some people) it became really clear that we were weak on two things:

1)(the obvious) we don’t have very good and stable recognition programs specific to rewards for achieving goals and/or obtaining cool accomplishments.
2)(and this is the one that caught me off guard) We are not very good at recognizing the group as people.

I went and looked up the word ‘recognition’ in the dictionary. It’s funny to me, in hindsight, that the majority of my attention was pointing to the below number 5 below however, that’s in the minority of the true definition of ‘recognition’.

I just thought this was a cool little epiphany everyone would like and be able to apply (although I’m sure most of you were wayyy ahead of me on this one). We are now challenged with the thought of ‘how do you recognize people as people??’ (and we have a few good ideas)

rec⋅og⋅ni⋅tion
   /ˌrɛk əgˈnɪʃ ən/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [rek-uh g-nish-uh n] Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. an act of recognizing or the state of being recognized.

2. the identification of something as having been previously seen, heard, known, etc.

3. the perception of something as existing or true; realization.

4. the acknowledgment of something as valid or as entitled to consideration: the recognition of a claim.

5. the acknowledgment of achievement, service, merit, etc.

6. the expression of this in the form of some token of appreciation: This promotion constitutes our recognition of her exceptional ability.

7. formal acknowledgment conveying approval or sanction.