Public speaking

Improving workplace morale is a minor industry all by itself, what with management seminar guidance and stuff. Sure, in this economy labor is a seller's market, but still, people put a lot of time and energy into figuring out how to keep employees happy, or at least placated worker bees.

Here's my suggestion: public speaking education. I think I'm pretty good at public speaking, or at least better than average, due to a little experience and a lot of being exposed to it, although I'm well aware that I haven't actually put that to the test in years now. I also think I'm a better-than-average connoisseur of it for the same reasons. (Yes, I know I tend to use very long sentences here, and almost completely negate myself with exceptions and caveats. Just because I think I can speak and/or write well doesn't mean I choose to bother with it all the time.)

However, most people don't do it well at all. Speech in which the volume of the speaker's voice fades to nearly nothing at the end of every sentence is starting to seem normal to me. People stammer, they use verbal chaff and white noise like "um" and "ah" and "y'know" and "it is what it is", they change the subject of their sentence in the middle of the sentence, they go into digressions that take up more time than the actual topic, PowerPoint is justifiably infamous for its overuse and misuse in certain government agencies and could support a series of posts here all by itself... All this can be mitigated by conscious effort and/or education, but apparently most people can't, don't know about, or choose not to bother with those.

It's sad how undervalued the skill is. It's probably been on a decline in society since literacy reached the point where most people didn't need the newspaper read to them. These days the only people who speak before groups of unfamiliar people larger than college seminars are people in politics and media. And while those are both big industries (and some college seminars get pretty big) that still leaves lots and lots of people around the world being addressed in groups of a few dozen by speakers who are doing a very poor job of it.

I'll bet skill at this kind of thing makes a bigger difference than people think, sometimes even just at a subconscious level. When my boss's boss's boss called a meeting on short notice for no apparent reason with attendance mandatory in a too-small conference room, it left me wondering why. Was there something urgent going on? Was it bad news? But no, apparently he called the meeting mainly just to let us know about an upcoming survey on workplace satisfaction. There was also an update about his pursuit of a political appointment (which probably didn't sound self-aggrandizing at all to many people in the department who work closely with him or with the industry's community and would be affected by it, but it did to me), and there was a lot of verbal chaff and white noise and disjointed thinking, but the main point was asking us to fill out the survey we'd be getting in the mail in a couple days.

Personally, the biggest drain on my satisfaction at work is the doomed project. He could be handling it better, but the most basic problem with it, the deadline, is beyond his control as well. As for things he actually has control of, the best thing he could do to help my satisfaction is avoid holding boring, pointless meetings in rooms at double capacity that remind me how many people in management are incompetent at public speaking. It raises the question, what else are they incompetent at? It leaves me thinking of Dilbert and Office Space rather than feeling like we're in good hands here at work.