Bravo to David Spark (whom, unbelievably, I still haven’t met) for calling BS on the practices employed by far too many companies in their efforts to boost employee morale.

Sparks decries as condescending and meaningless such activities as handing out worthless certificates of appreciation, distributing “achievement ribbons” and hanging morale-boosting banners in the office.

Sparks’ rant reminded me of a situation I encountered while working at Mattel in the mid 1980s. Morale was suffering for a variety of reasons, leading Jack, my boss (I can’t recall if he was a senior VP or an executive VP), to call me into his office and instruct me to hire employee incentive company Maritz to come in and run a 90-day morale-boosting campaign. He already had a theme in mind:

By virtue of acquisition, Hasbro had recently overtaken Mattel as the top toy company. It was an ongoing game of leapfrog—whoever acquired a new company became the new leader—and it was decidedly not the reason morale had tanked at Mattel. But Jack envisioned banners, rallies, buttons and other collateral that would pump people up and drive them to improve their performance. Ultimately, he said with chest-puffing confidence, “Nothing improves morale like success.”

Right. There’s never been a company performing well financially that nevertheless treated its employees like crap.

But I digress. There is only one way to improve morale in any organization: Identify and fix the conditions that have led to lowered morale in the first place.

That’s the argument I made to Jack. He looked deflated that his rallies and banners woulnd’t happen, but he reluctantly agreed. I brought a consultant in to assess the situation. (I had the distinct pleasure of working with Joe Williams and Jeff Herrington, who worked for Joe at the time.) The consulting team identified the issues and we worked together to come up with solutions.

Unfortunately, Mattel’s CEO at the time wasn’t what you’d call an employee-centric leader. I presented the research results and proposals to him. His response: “Employees only care about two things: What day is payday and how many minutes early can I leave?”

And therein lay the real reason employee morale sucked: Leadership didn’t value them.

Things did improve over the years (concurrent with changes in leadership). But to return to Sparks’ spot-on post, improving morale won’t happen with hastily printed certificates, disingenuous speeches, pep rallies, banners, posters, cheap employee picnics and holiday parties, or any other activity that doesn’t specifically address the situations that resulted in low morale.

What kind of BS morale-boosting activities has your company tried?