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Your Employees Want More Than Booze

The work sponsored happy hour isn’t boosting morale.

Vanessa Torre
4 min readMay 3, 2019
Photo by Jonas Jacobsson via Unsplash

I read an article last week about how the White House has started implementing happy hours for employees at the end of long work weeks. They’re also putting in a popcorn machine…

Because we all know nothing boosts morale like standing around on Friday in a toxic environment picking popcorn kernels out of your teeth in front of your coworkers.

The end of week work sponsored happy hour sounds like a good idea, but it’s not. If you have a toxic work environment, gathering disgruntled employees to stand around on a Friday afternoon drinking mildly cold Stella Artois with other disgruntled employees is not going to help.

Offering perks like this works wonderfully well if you already have happy employees that enjoy being at work. If this is the case, I raise my glass to you. It’s easy to keep people happy with liquor, not so much to get them there.

Let’s face it, as well intended as Mulvaney’s White House Happy Hour is, it’s never going to work. Ever. If there is any rumbling of the masses, getting them together for adult beverages is not going to help for number of reasons.

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Vanessa Torre
Vanessa Torre

Written by Vanessa Torre

Top 10 feminist writer. Writing, coaching, and relentlessly hyping women in midilfe. linktr.ee/Vanessaltorre Email: vanessa@vanessatorre.com

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