Demotivational Speakers On The Rise Nationwide

'Accelerated voluntary attrition' the best way to make the most of companies' hiring freezes, analysts say

By B.L. O'Harde
Democratic American Motivator Magazine

They can only admit it privately behind closed doors, but the message is clear: Corporate executives across the land would rather their employees just quit.

The economy is spiraling. Shareholders are angry. Horseshoe-haired heads are on the chopping block.

Enter: the demotivational speaker.

With hiring freezes reaching sub-zero temperatures, companies are learning that crushing, corporate-wide employee cynicism is a weapon to be wielded, not a phenomenon to be feared, says Dr. Dan Douner, head of the National Demotivational Alliance, a consulting firm that is considered a pioneer in the field of demotivational speaking.

Key to the alliance's strategy is an initiative known behind closed doors as "AVC."

"We're incredibly honored to help companies downsize through what we call Accelerated Voluntary Attrition," Douner said. "Most executives these days are Baby Boomers who see outright firing or laying off employees as hypocritical to the worldview they held 30 years ago."

The program rests on the notion that employees effectively stripped of motivation will be encouraged to surrender their jobs, allowing salaries to be absorbed, Douner explains.

The process, however, requires a deliberate, concerted effort to target the most-appropriate employees to encourage to quit, he says.

The core of the program rests on training seminars designed to identify those best to keep and those who "would be best served to realize that we appreciate their past service but that we no longer have a place for their favorable performance and, more importantly, their competitive salaries," Douner says.

Among the seminars:

-- "Ask not what you can do for your company. Ask what the company likely believes you should avoid doing."

-- "The change will be painful, but we'll succeed as a team -- even if we fail."

-- "How not to blame the person who screwed it all up and still come out on top."

The cumulative effect of the seminars -- designed with intense sessions constructed to push the normal psyche into a state of survival mode -- provides insight necessary to identifying and classifying current employees, said Fuller Bolschitt, a leading demotivational trainer.

On one hand, Bolschitt said, a number of employees quit because they see the training seminars as metaphors for how the workplace has become a toxic environment.

These people -- labeled "unfortunate relics of constructive institutional insubordination"-- are immediately targeted as the main focus of the demotivational purging effort.

Meanwhile, the training helps retain those employees who have been identified as having superior passive-aggressive skills -- skills that will serve to further foment resentment in the workplace and alleviate pressure on actual decision-makers, Bolschitt says.

"Those employees are the lynch pin of an organization," he says. "Corporations keep them demotivated on the promise that their skills will lead them to the ranks of middle management, where petty power struggles will invariably force more people to quit and reverse-motivate themselves to protect their jobs."

And along the way, Bolschitt said, they will periodically force one another to quit, leaving vacant a frozen middle management position in addition to the lower-level job they had vacated that also is now frozen.

"In the short term, we have to increase management positions, which helps us give the impression that the tenets of our demotivational campaign are virtue" he said. "After a while, however, they end up hating one another and not the company and fail to notice the subsequent cuts in their management field."

That, he said, helps the company maintain the image that only the most-talented are allowed to continue working, giving them the foundation to rationalize carrying more workload and in turn keeping the company's most-basic functions operating.

"In all of this," Douner says, "we have to remember that everybody wins -- except those who lose."

To schedule a seminar, Douner suggests visiting the alliance's website or calling 1-800-INVECT.