Staff Motivation for Dummys

Well with more requests for people than they have people, and all the good people leaving (not just me) my employers, or dumb and dumber as they should be known have recently just turned up the heat under their employee satisfaction programme. And how do you suppose they are going about motivating people?
Paying them competitive salaries? NO!
Developing their professional or personal capabilities? NO!
Respecting them for the competent professionals that they are? NO!
Listening to their feedback and using the criticism to forge a better working place? NO!

They are awarding Amazon vouchers to all those employees who have been billable for the last calendar year. Now obviously I miss out on this as I am leaving, but lets just stop and think about this. A project should by definition have an objective, and an end point, so if you happen to work on a project (unlike me) and it completes (as you would hope it would) and the business developers have nothing lined up for you immediately, you instantly fall out of this hallowed tier (of approx 50%) of the employees. The swede was billable for 50 weeks (of the 52 in review) and missed out on the parade of honour.
So in effect the employees are being rewarded for something they had no control over, as long as they weren?t so bad that the client requested they be replaced, then they get the praise.

Way to go!!

Also the employee survey had a number of technical problems and these are now being blamed for a large number of things:
i) ?employees could not access the survey which is why we had such a poor turnout (65% vs minimum target 75%)? ? I assume that management are measured on employee morale and a good indication is that people want to help make their workplace better, therefore the minimum target is probably a management objective, missing this target is therefore a failure to meet expectations. But not if the reason is ?technical problems?, what could management do? So the technical problems alone and not the unbearably low morale are responsible for the poor attendance.
ii) ?any negative comments were as a result of frustration with the technical problems in the administration of the survey and not indicative of poor morale? because we are all such simple ADHD afflicted idiots that we couldn?t possibly accurately recall the events of the last year whilst facing such distracting technical adversity, otherwise of course our satisfaction ratings would have been sky high.

I guess when you are poised above the abyss you will grasp at anything at all to prevent your fall.

Read whilst listening to two germans crying over their premature retirement