the job from heck: morale problems

This is the last of my job from heck documents. By the end of my time there, I had an X-Files poster up over my desk (they’d moved me into an alcove beneath the stairs, and no, I hadn’t read Harry Potter yet) and I used to say that if the poster came down, they’d know I’d quit. This was the job where, if I didn’t see my manager’s car parked outside, I would walk in thinking “Maybe she didn’t wake up this morning” and feel good until she did show up, proving she was still alive and I still needed to deal with her. That job was bad for my soul.  The other two pieces are at http://philangelus.wordpress.com/2008/07/29/job-from-heck-soft-soap/ and http://philangelus.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/the-job-from-heck-this-is-top-priority/

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To: Middle Management
Re: Morale problems among staff
High Priority
______________________________

It has been noted that the staff is currently undergoing a morale problem, namely that morale has gotten too high. Managers should take the following steps for the immediate rectification of this problem:

1. Micromanage staff. Check up on the most simplistic details of their jobs
2. Make weekly changes to procedure.
3. Nestle everyone in a niche and forbid anyone to leave it
4. Discourage experimentation and any shred of individuality, down to the color schemes on their desktops.
5. Create subgroups and secrets in order to promote factionalism.
6. Continually add to people’s responsibilities.
7. Make sure each person has to report to at least three managers at any given moment. Do not allow these managers to speak to one another about what tasks they have assigned the same person.
8. Everyone has something of which he is proud. Ignore it, or better, belittle it.
9. Break the rules for some to imply favoritism.
10. Discount employees’ personal experiences in favor of what you perceive as the way the world really works.
11. Walk away while employees speak to you. Don’t listen to staff if you can because they’re supposed to be complaining. Talk at length yourself.
12. Change your stories. Change the goals.
13. Assign a priority to each task: top priority. Interrupt other top priority assignments for yours, which genuinely are more important.
14. Praise often and lavishly and as insincerely as possible.
15. Create multiple missions.
16. Don’t reveal the big picture; release only the minimal information necessary for the minimal accomplishment of one’s tasks.
17. Ask for mediocrity.
18. Set unrealistic goals for paltry rewards.
19. Make people do work which you don’t follow up on.

The swift implementation of these goals will soon resolve our company’s morale problem, assuming the managerial staff can do something as simple as this. Morale correction is our top goal! Generate a report for the upper management outlining your progress, due by 2:30 this afternoon.