The Importance of Morale at Work

Around this time a few years ago, I was working on a very large project, for which my employer had engaged a consulting company to provide about a third of the development resources. The project had been deemed essential to my employers future strategy and worthy of the time and resources invested. The project ran long, as they tend to do when many, many people have been charged with working on an initiative. One day the higher ups looked at the project, exclaimed: the project is costing a million dollars a month! We're hemoraging. The consultants must go! Subsequently, an email came out announcing this decision and that a 2 week stay of execution would be allowed to provide "enough" time for knowledge transfer from the consultants to the staff on their assigned tasks. My first thought was: well this sucks. My second thought was: naturally the release date won't change.

And I was correct: it did suck and the date did not move. There seemed to be no acknowledgement that removing a third of the resources might impact the timeframe. As usual, the bottom line had won out without a true analysis of the cost. Yes, the million dollars a month was reduced, but the to lecture us on the importance of the project and it's ability to improve our revenue, thus making the date was imperitive... really? The project is SO important to you that you cut the resources? The project is SO important to you that you don't care how badly you have impacted the morale of your staff. Not only did you disrupt their relationships with people, some of whom we had been working with for almost two years, you then added insult to injury by increasing our work when we took over their tasks. The situation resembled when companies have large layoffs, but at least in that case there is an acknowledgement of loss and that people may be upset. Here the attitude was: they were consultants, not permanent employees. You should not feel badly about them. Nor should we have felt badly for ourselves, working new and increasingly insane hours to achieve the impossible: completing the project on time. Management viewed our extra labor as free, because after all, as exempt employees it was! The next announcement corporate wide was that in order to keep the company costs down, there would be no raises that year. We should work hard to make the date, so the company can make more revenue (and greater profit due to lowered expenses), and yet, we will not gain from our labor.

Tell me, what is our motivation? Higher ups may say: pride in a job well done. But I somehow doubt they weren't getting raises, that their bonus pool was reduced in any way. Are you surprised that the project dragged on and on because the morale of the team plummeted? Would you be shocked to discover because of these delays the total cost of the project was higher than if the consultants had been kept?

Lessons to management:
1. The short cut way does not always take you down the shortest path
2. The measly staff level people know can smell your hypocrisy a mile away
3. The morale of the people who do the work matters