Improving Company Morale?

Undaar asks: "I work as a developer for a web development company. We were pretty hard hit (as were many companies that do what we do) by the "economic down-turn". The company went from over 500 people to under 200 in under two years. It's more stable now, but people are consistently laid-off. Consequently people feel like they always have to look over their shoulder to avoid getting fired. Most lunches are spent complaining about lack of enjoyment/challenge from the job and the fact that upper-management seems not to understand what we do. Employers: what have you done to improve employee morale in your company? As an employee, what can I do to improve the morale in the people I work with? How can I make my work environment more enjoyable? What kind of constructive suggestions can I take to management so that they can help improve the situation?"

Read

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Read this [amazon.com]. The leader in your company should be the first to take on long hours, pay cuts, all of the worst jobs. Set the example for your employees and most importantly, do it with a smile on your face.

Re:Alcohol

[Anonymous Coward]

That works for small companies. Our company used to do that when our division was small but as we grew, liability became an issue and the alcohol was canned.

Re:Morale?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, moral at our company is as low as it goes. I thought it couldn't get worse, then they said they were cancelling the biscuit supply! (major cost saving, apparently). Never mind saving money by sacking all our crappy IT managers who have no technical knowledge and keep buying new servers for every 3rd party app we get (on the 3rd party company advice - so their margins go up).

Free meals? Whe had a christmas meal and our boss insisted we have 7 pizzas between 8 of us (I wish I were kidding!!).

I improve my moral by bitching about them *and* doing everything I can to move! My boss tried to improve my moral by asking if I could work this Sunday!

Sorry, had to get that off my chest...I *do* feel better now.

Mistake about Atta

[Ex-MislTech]

http://www.adl.org/rumors/atta_rumors.asp

Re:Coding contest

[TheRaven64]

Ask your boss if he/she has read a book called 'Peopleware'. It was out of print when I read it, but a quick google shows that there's a second edition out now. It's the best book on management theory I've ever seen. This was one of the ideas it put forward.

If you can get hold of a copy, it's well worth the read. It contains some very entertaining stories, some true and some made up to illustrait a point. My favourite is where Alexander Graham Bell is trying to sell his new 'Bell-o-phone', in a modern era which does not have telephones:

Boss: So, if my employee is busy when this Bell-o-phone rings, what happens? Does it just stop and let them get on with their work?
Bell: No! That's the best part! It keeps on ringing and ringing until someone answers.
Boss: Thank you, the door's that way.

Moral: interrupting your staff is not a good way of making them productive. Another (true) story talks of a CEO who walked into a room full of employees, and signed a major deal without reading it. When queried by one of his lawyers he replied 'I don't read contracts, that's what I pay you guys for.' Moral: Treat your employees with respect. Don't try to do their jobs for them. Your lawyers should know more about contracts than you, and your coders should know more about software development than you. This is why you employ specialists. Their job is to make sure that products work, yours is to make sure the company works.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I'm curious, how do you prototype software?

It's simple, really:

• Gather some requirements - find out what the people want.
• Build a basic design. From this, you should get some interaction diagrams, state diagrams, and the general functionality of the software, including what's fast, slow, and what's easy to add.
• From this, you build a paper prototype. take it to the original customers and walk them through it. Go to step 1 until the design closely resembles what they customer wants.
• This last step is dependent on available resources. Don't break the bank searching for perfection, but don't just throw crap against the wall until something sticks.
• Build a functioning prototype - it should be implemented quickly and reflect the design. Only implement fully the areas that need to be modelled.
• Take this to the customer. Modify requirements and design. This should be minor tweaking.
• Build the software. The overall structure of the code should be clear before you begin, and detailed requirements should be done. This is mainly building code and testing it, both at a fine level and in its interaction.

Promotion? Also, read "Peopleware"

[mib]

I'm amazed to see so many suggestions regarding promotion possibilities -- I wonder if you all work in a different IT industry to me. I'm only 30 (don't laugh), but I'm already as high up the technical career ladder as it's possible to be at my workplace (and changing jobs would be a demotion based on the job ads I've seen). To get any higher I'd have to become a manager, which doesn't yet excite me. Isn't there more to a career than just climbing the ziggurat?

Anyway, if you are a manager, the best advice I can give is to find a copy of Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, read it, and use its advice. It's a thin book, but it is +100 Insightful when it comes to employees. Some links on the book:

• Publisher's info at Dorset House [dorsethouse.com]
• Slashdot review from some time in the past [slashdot.org] (can't find a year on the page).
• Freshmeat review from 2002 [freshmeat.net].
• Atlantic Systems Guild [systemsguild.com], consulting company run by the book's authors.