Ways to Raise Your Employees’ Morale

Pleasing employees is like second-guessing the stock market; you have to work extremely hard to get it right, most experts agree you can’t do it consistently, and if you get it wrong then you’ll end up with no money and hated by everyone, particularly yourself.

Fortunately, unlike the ungovernable and incorporeal stock market, employees are both governable and corporeal; meaning that you will be able to govern them into a real corps of happy, hardworking staff. Follow these rules and you’ll get consistent, positive results; because, just like in the stock market, an employee really is just a number.

5. Speak louder

There’s a simple reason that your employees act like morons, and that they never do anything properly; because you’re not speaking loudly enough. In the last war film you saw, when the officer said “fire!” did any of the soldiers go, “oh, sorry, did you say fire? I’ll get to work on that right away, but because I only just found out that firing is what you want from me I’ll not be able to get it done today. How’s Wednesday for you?” No, they damn well fired, and the only difference between you and that officer is that you aren’t shouting loudly enough.

Shouting reduces the need for your employees to ask questions. If they do ask one, repeat what you just said, but louder. Nine times out of ten, they are just asking for re-affirmation, and how better to explain what you said than by saying it again, but louder? Try standing closer to them as well. That’ll make it seem louder still.

Also, shouting means that everyone near you will hear you all of the time. This creates a network effect, where everyone knows what you want and can work together as a team to meet those needs. Anything to make the shouting stop. This hectic drive to complete their tasks will give your employees occupational value, and consequently they’ll feel meaningfully employeed.

4. Efficiency savings

Efficiency savings can be made everywhere; and an efficient employee is a happy employee. I will make an efficiency saving in this paragraph by not explaining what they are, but will instead demonstrate them. Here are a few tips:

Reduce power consumption; Make your employees work in the dark, or limit the maximum temerature of coffee to lukewarm – all helping save valuable utilities money - and reducing the likelihood of scalding injuries. An employee with burnt genitals will not have high morale.

Why not ban the use of adjectives and adverbs from written documents? This makes documents clearer, quicker to write, and cheaper to print. Ban adjectives and adverbs from employee conversations too to reduce the time it takes them to speak. In fact, why not ban nouns, verbs and conjunctions, and ban employee conversations altogether?

Why not make them bring all of the documents they have printed to you before they can get more blank paper, just to show that they have used it wisely. Also, get them to drop a few font sizes on printouts and get them into the habit of checking pictures and diagrams with a magnifying glass, allowing a 90% reduction in size. Colour ink is especially expensive, so remove it from the printers.

Why not draw paths on the floor to illustrate the shortest distance between every part of the office? Then if the employees deviate from the pre-set paths you can force them to explain why, which will make them think about personal efficiency as a penance for taking slightly longer to get from one place to another. Remind them that this isn’t a Sunday stroll; it’s a busy workplace environment.

Why not efficiensize the phonetic alphabet? The existing alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie etc, etc.) is very boring. It has no contextual consistency, making it difficult to remember, and the words themselves are mundane, so when your employees use them their voices will slur with ennui, soon leaving them a hollow shell of their potential, efficient selves. You need to replace it with a new phonetic alphabet; one with a strong thematic link running through it and memorable words which trip off the tongue delightfully. Why not get your employees to use this new Phonetic Alphabet (With Dinosaurs)?

3. Masturbation Fridays:

Masturbation Fridays speak for themselves, I feel.

2. Laugh everything off

One man’s harassment is another man’s banter. Just laugh it off when you hear that an employee has been harassed and they will surely follow suit. After all, it’s impossible to fill in a complaint form if your hand is shaking with all that laughter (or possibly from the emotional devastation, but probably with laughter).

Also, if you fail to make good on a promise, such as forgetting to refill the fire extinguishers or distribute last week’s wages, then just say “woops!” and laugh cheerfully, which will encourage everyone else to see the funny side and join in. If they don’t, fire them, then laugh. You don’t need their sort around here, glumming everything up with their misery.

1. Concentration boosting:

Did you know that drinking lots of water improves your concentration? This is because water swooshes around your brain, washes of the dust, and restores it to a shiny pinkness.

So force your employees to drink more water. Here’s what to do; secretly record everything they do for a day and add together all the times they drop a pen, make a minor spelling error (even if they fix it, they're still wasting time), or otherwise lapse from total concentration. Add all these numbers up, then present them with the number, tell them it is their lack-of-concentration score, and let them know that you expect this number to go down significantly if they drink another 2 or 3 litres of water during the working day.

Then fire them if it doesn’t. After all, they obviously disobeyed your instruction to drink more water.

To assist your employees, install new water fountains and secretly pop a few handfuls of caffeine in them to further increase their concentration. Make these new fountains the hubs of the office, where people go to liaise with colleagues over a mind-boosting cup of bitter, caffeinated water. Give them a name; how about energy hubs, or brain zones, or concentration camps?

Soon your employees will be efficient, cheerful, focussed and, most importantly, hard working. If not, then keep doing all of the above but using an even louder voice.