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?"

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[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Read this. 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: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.