Save money on building maintenance and grounds keeping while boosting morale. Did you know that you can have your employees help reduce your building and grounds maintenance costs, and have them love you for coming up with the idea? Here’s how!
Disguise working for free as fun. All you have to do is create a fun, group event, serve some food, have everybody pitch in for an afternoon with rakes or paint brushes. You can boost employee morale AND get your building maintenance or grounds keeping done for free. In these troubled economic times, your regular grounds keeping and maintenance staff will be too worried about losing their jobs to object, even if they are unionized, and if they’re already outsourced you have nothing to worry about anyway.
As always, your people are your biggest asset. Losing a few hours of your staff’s time to such a project is not a problem. Most of them were probably going to be goofing off in any case, and they’ll be happy to get out of the office. Besides, if you are paying them anyway then it’s all just “sunk cost”, and you don’t have to worry about it. If you have lunch brought in, set up a large boom box or PA system to provide some music, and maybe a ring toss game or something, people will love it, and will totally miss the fact that you are getting skilled staff, MBAs, and even a few PhDs to do menial labor. You can go out, make a short and grateful speech, and then retire to watch from your corner office window while enjoying a gourmet lunch and having a bit of putting practice. The lull in the pace of business meetings will be refreshing, and the facilities will look great.
Hold the event at the same time every year. Make your morale boosting event an annual celebration of the season. Springtime is a natural for planting, mulching, and trimming around the grounds. Fall is a good time to renovate parts of the office, shop, or plant. You can even promote the event with posters and emails.
Your management savvy will be the envy of your peers. Your competitors will be jealous, and will start copying you immediately. Of course, they may do that with the help of some of your ex-employees, who left you after becoming discouraged by such tactics. A few may perceive your morale event as a misuse of their skills and talents, and get the wrong-headed idea that you don’t value them, but they are probably just the more troublesome employees and whiners anyway – the ones who think for themselves are usually the biggest problems. You are better off without them, for a number of what should be obvious reasons.
How to make sure the event benefits you personally. Unless you have budget responsibility for grounds and building maintenance this type of event doesn’t provide you much direct benefit in the all-important numbers, but maybe you can get the CEO to notice what a really committed and loyal team player you are. In that case this could be another step on your way to the top.
copyright 1998, 2008, Timothy F. Prosser, This line must be included in all copies
Tags: bad management, business humor, expense control, humor, improving morale, management secrets
