Top Five Reasons I Hate Motivational Posters

Let's face it, motivational posters are an insult to our intelligence. Do you really need to see some stupid piece of framed paper on the wall of the office everyday that says: "When we all work together, we all win together"? Doesn't that remind you of something your kindergarten teacher used to say? The only reason managers put this one on the wall is because they know if they actually say it to an employee they stand about a 50% chance of getting punched right in the mouth.

2. Motivational posters take up valuable corporate wall space that could be used for better things, like a report on whether or not the employees are ever going to get another raise that isn't less than the new family insurance rates.

Have you looked to see what these silly-ass motivational posters cost? There's a million of them out there with a million publishers producing them. If your company has these things posted all over the place, they've probably spent the equivalent of a month of your salary to buy them. Just go find some advertised on the web and look at the fees. You'd think they were original Butterfield serialized prints!

3. Motivational posters always depict people and places that make you wish you were at the location in the picture rather than stuck in a dank, artificial cubicle all day.

Now how the heck is that motivational? Here I am, trying to talk on the phone with 30 other conversations on speaker phones from engineers and technicians sitting around me, sweating like a pig in the amazon because the AC isn't working right again, and you stick a three foot tall picture of some guy climbing a glacier on the wall for me to look at all day. How about I rip that thing down, shred it, and use the result to build a fire on my desk this winter when the AC is finally fixed but the heating doesn't work?

4. Most of the time, the caption has nothing to do with the photo.

So I'm looking at one of these retard art pieces right now. It's a picture of a dolphin jumping out of the ocean (truth be told, the poor sea mammal is probably trapped in an algae and leech infested pool at some run-down marine park), and the caption some booger-picking-moron thought up for it is: "There is no end to the amount of things you can accomplish".

Huh? What in Ol' Scratch's domain does that have to do with a dolphin jumping out of the water? That poor critter can't do much more than pro-create, eat, crap, and jump out of the water. I don't see where there's much above that it's going to be able to accomplish.

5. When the caption actually does have something in common with the photo, it's usually going to deliver the opposite message if you extend the activity in the photo to it's logical conclusion.

Yeah, I've pulled another one of these things developed by acid-dropping baboons up in a google image search. It's a picture of a football player in flight, four feet off the ground, stretched horizontal and reaching out to catch a football. The captions says: "Great Results Require Great Ambitions". Sure, but do they also require that you hyper-extend your arms, break three ribs, and get dog-piled by a bunch of 240 pound defensive tackles who will spear you with their helmets as soon as you achieve your great ambitions?

It's time to retire the motivational posters. They will do nothing but insult the intelligence of any employee who has an IQ higher than that of a plastic spoon. If you just have to hang something on the wall with the good intention of boosting morale, hang some of the parody "demotivational" posters you'll find on the web. A lot of them are very witty and many are even workplace safe. They'll at least make your employees chuckle and let them know you have a sense of humor.