Patricia Grisafi
In the workplace, it’s important to keep morale high and workers happy! Treat them like human beings with lives and dreams and goals that are important outside of work. Be kind and supportive — and you will probably have a really great team and atmosphere.
Unfortunately, a lot of businesses and employers are horrible at empathy and even worse at creating a positive environment for their employees. On Reddit, folks are sharing their “beatings will continue until morale improves” stories — and let’s just say, don’t be like that if you are in any kind of leadership position.
1. So Many Meetings
“We were all swamped with more work than we could complete and mandatory meetings would happen often that were to discuss why we were behind and what they could do. One guy actually spoke up and said STOP HAVING SO MANY MEETINGS AND LET US WORK, EVERY MINUTE OF THIS MEETING IS PUTTING ME FURTHER BEHIND!. They literally called another meeting 30 minutes later to discuss how the last meeting was not a positive experience for them.” —
2. Mandatory Fun
“If you did not display an enthused reaction to the ‘Mandatory Fun’ activities, you were put on the sh*t list.” —
3. Motivation
“Each of us had to go into a room with the COO and a general manager and watch a youtube motivational video with them. It was one of those narrated videos where it’s some person drawing cartoons and text on a whiteboard. Like all you can see is a hand and the whiteboard in fast motion. Anyway, the theme of the video was that you should be following your passion and pay should be secondary and not a motivation. After the video they then asked us, individually, ‘would you like to ask us to lower your pay?’ As if that was the take away we should be getting from the video. It was totally absurd.” —
4. Dress Code
“They would update the dress code every time anyone came in wearing anything the boss didn’t like, even if it was entirely appropriate for work. Bill got a new tie for Father’s Day and it has bright green stripes? All-staff email the next day banning ‘distracting colors.’ There were only like 15 employees all working in one small building, too, so it was obvious who the boss was targeting each time.” —
5. No Winning
“Manager asked what to do about low morale and high turnover. I know he’s a hard*ss so I offer something simple, ‘well there’s only 3 chairs for the given 15-25 of us on an average day, how about we get some more?’ His response was, verbatim, ‘DONT YOU START THIS FIGHT WITH ME BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT GOING TO WIN.'”
6. Surveys
“They sent a survey about what our perceptions about the workplace were. Voicing some issues with some areas was 100% going to get you in trouble so I complained that the survey was not anonymous, and didn’t complete most of it. Some days later I was personally contacted by 3 people wanting to find out what was wrong. They completely missed the whole point.” —
7. Who Is Happy?
“I once worked at a company where morale was very low due to extreme micromanagement, low pay, and having to provide tech support for a product that frankly sucked. So they called us into a series of meetings to ‘discuss’ the issue. The guy leading the meeting asked us as soon as we sat down, ‘Who here is happy in their job?’ And like one or two people raised their hands. He then said, ‘Well in this economy, you’re lucky to have a job at all. Meeting over.’ And then he left.” —
8. I Am Tired Of This Yacht
“Worked in a fintech company in the UK in the 90s. It grew to around 1000 people, building towards IPO. HR decided we needed a company magazine to boost morale and give us a sense of community. First issue landed and the cover story was, perhaps predictably, a profile of the new CEO. A decent guy fairly well liked up until they point, worked his way through a few roles in the company. Except the angle they decided to focus on, to show us his human side, was how he was getting tired of his current 55ft yacht and was hoping that the efforts of we, his minions, would reward him with enough bonus to be able to upgrade to a 76ft model in time for summer. Reader, I do not believe it has the desired effect.” —
9. Micromanaging
“I worked in a small IT-based company where the owner had some pretty bad anger issues. He also had his whole family in supervisor positions. The actual techs were great and we were a pretty tight knit group who took pride in our work. There was a period where the tech group had shrunk pretty small and newer techs were bouncing pretty quickly after being hired once they got a real glimpse at what a sh*tshow the place was. The quality of work ended up suffering enough that we had daily all hands on deck meetings talking about it and morale was a central issue. Our main complaint was the owner’s meddling and micromanaging but he never got the hint, so we kept having these daily meetings. We then came up with the joke ‘The meetings will continue until morale improves.'”
10. No Thank You
“We had to take a survey and one question was ‘aside from getting a pay increase, what would make you feel more appreciated in your current position?’ And we all wrote down things like birthdays off with pay, less overtime, allow coffee/soft drinks while we are working, increase breaks from 10 minutes to 15 minutes.’ We all handed in the surveys. They did not implement a single suggestion.”
11. Do All The Jobs
“It would be too much work for you to train new staff, so you’ll just have to do your job plus most of someone else’s job while we dick around for months on a unicorn hunt looking for some magic candidate who perfectly fits into the open position with zero training.” —
12. Next Year Will Be Worse
“I’m a math teacher and have been teaching for 3 years. We had a whole new team for our grade level and my principal put me down as the grade level leader. Ok. No biggie. We had someone called a ‘math coach’ who was supposed to train the newbies and help them out. Nope. He put it all on me. I was in charge of training them on curriculum, which is SO NOT MY JOB and my expertise. The team was horrible. They knew nothing and I got no help. Told my principal and was told ‘If you want to be a leader, you need to handle tough situations like this!’ with them smiling at me. This year, I’ve never been so burnt out. Any time I asked for help I got a ‘you can tough it out!’ I begged for any kind of help from anyone. My new team refused to do anything bc ‘it’s easier if you to do it…we’re so stressed being new.’ This lasted for a whole school year. Imagine doing all the work for 5 people all at once, being treated like a whipping girl, and being told that I should expect this. Their students even came to me for help because their teachers did nothing in the classroom. My prinicipal was so shocked when I said I was leaving. I told them that I had no help and I was not standing to be treated like this when I am still a fairly new teacher. He kept saying next year will be much better because my team has improved (no they freaking haven’t). I said ‘Hell no. You allowed them to think I am there to do everything for them. Next year will be worse.'”
13. Thieves!
“Working in a department store, we had abysmal loss (shoplifting) numbers. Our managers read us the riot act every morning about making sure we spoke to every customer (management believed that no thief would stick around once an employee had said hello to them), kept an eye on the shoplifters’ usual hiding spots, watched
blacksuspicious looking customers carefully, etc. However we were explicitly forbidden from confronting anyone, even if we saw them stealing with our own eyes. All we could do was watch them and call for Loss Prevention over the radio. Our Loss Prevention guy worked three days a week and on the days he actually worked he never seemed to be around when we needed him. So every day we just had to smile and wave as brazen thieves walked out with armloads of merchandise. The GM decided that our loss numbers couldn’t possibly be due to, you know, actual shoplifting, but had to be from employee theft. So at the end of every shift each employee had to have their bag searched by a manager before they could leave. They fired one employee and tried to have her arrested because a till she worked on came up a few dollars short a few times in a week – even though that employee was a floater who didn’t have a dedicated register. She just happened to work on a few registers throughout the week that all came up $1-5 short. Funnily enough there were a couple of thieves on staff, but they only stole from other employees – we weren’t allowed to have locks on our lockers, so it was open season on employee’s wallets. And we were still getting yelled at every day for our loss numbers.” —
14. I’ve Decided On ‘C’
“I had a manager who would gather our team and ask us if we should do A or B. We were professionals and would provide arguments for and against both A and B, and provide her with an answer. She would then reply she had decided on C and that’s what we would do.” —
15. Your Services Are No Longer Required
“One time I worked for a major satellite TV company. I’d worked there twice before, so I was part of the ‘fast-track’ training programme, designed for people who have done the job before. It was four weeks, part-time, and on each Friday assessment I got 100% in literally all of my tests. They were Product Knowledge, Financial, Technical, and Customer Service. I got literally 100% in every test, and at the end of the fourth week the trainer told me in a feedback session that I had a lot of potential; there were supervisory positions and management roles and I could do very well there. The following morning I got a letter – meaning that it must have been posted before I even sat that last test – from the work agency that had recruited me, saying ‘thank you for your valued contribution on site but your services are no longer required.'” —
Featured Image: Pexels
