Between 1923 and 1929, Mather & Company produced annual offerings of work incentive posters to a customer base that included major corporations and factories.  During its most successful years, in the late 1920s, Mather claimed his business supplied more than 40,000 firms  nationwide.

Mather had only to look around Chicago to see the need and potential for his posters. Boasting the second largest industrial area in the country, Chicago had experienced historic labor unrest in the late teens, which led to the creation of new forms of employee representation and benefits. In return, management expected higher worker productivity. As conceived, Mather posters not only served to motivate but also to school employees in appropriate workplace behavior.

“Say It With Snap!” tracks the visual strategies and thinking behind the Mather posters through a selection of 48 examples. Their designs adhere to a standard format consisting of a three-part message and a single image, which was increasingly streamlined as the palette became more colorful. During the early years, the incentives targeted white-collar workers and featured the images and voices of these workers and their managers. Later the intended audience expanded to factory workers. The posters became more playful, as allegorical images borrowed from popular entertainments such as sports, music, and circuses were introduced. Throughout, their content reflected both positive and negative approaches to motivating employees with affirmations like “You Are Working for Yourself” alternating with messages like “What Are Loafers Paid?”

A curious blend of old and new thinking shaped the look and content of these posters. The character traits and behaviors advocated largely represented Victorian values such as character, self-discipline, and initiative, the new addition being self-motivation. Managers favored these older values as a basis for maintaining their authority while fostering closer relationships with their workers and workers’ loyalty. 

The new thinking that informed the posters’ messaging grew out of a new management approach to motivating employees. Between 1900 and 1920, managers looked to logic, reason, and monetary rewards as key worker incentives. Following World War I, however, management theory embraced motivation over force as a superior strategy in shaping human behavior. Aesthetics and visual images were adopted as the most effective means of shaping behavior. Daily exposure to motivational posters that conveyed consistent messages, it was believed, would influence workers unconsciously to form the desired habits. 

Did the posters work? While there is little evidence to measure their impact, it seems likely that both workers and managers saw through the rhetoric and responded pragmatically to achieve individual goals. Certainly visual communications continue to play a role in employee motivation and productivity today, as witnessed in the ironic messages conveyed through the “demotivational” posters and array of office accessories offered by Despair.com.