The idea of designating an "Employee of the Month" is supposed to instill motivation and esprit de corps in a company's staff, but it can work the other way too. For the sake of brevity, let's just call this form of recognition "EOM".
At one company where I worked and an EOM policy was in effect, there was a twofold EOM reward.
One reward was having the privilege of parking one's automobile right up close to the employee entrance. The top executives each had a reserved parking stall right near that entrance and sharing that perk at least for one month was one benefit. The other was to have a large, framed portrait photograph of the EOM mounted prominently on the wall in the employee cafeteria for all to admire.
So one day, this one particular engineer was cited as EOM and sure enough, his image was up there on the wall for everyone to see. However, shortly afterward, that engineer quit and although he was known to have resigned and left the company, his picture was never removed. This EOM image stayed there for multiple months, never being taken down.
You can imagine the effect on employee attitudes with everyone knowing that to be the case.
The other day, I had to visit a rather large store in a Long Island shopping mall and as I parked my car and walked over to the customer entrance, I saw this:

Where'd he go???
Aside from my reflex chauvinistic assumption that the designated EOM was a "he", that reserved parking space was vacant.
Did that actually mean anything? Maybe not. Maybe that EOM was just absent from work that day, but my unavoidable gut reaction was that another EOM plan may have gone awry too.
Incidental images (sometimes called "optics"), rightly or wrongly, do have impact. They do affect thought processes. They do count.