Do happy employees make for satisfied customers -- who make for higher revenues that lead to increased profits, which of course pleases shareholders, who then pay executives to reward managers for continuing to keep the employees happy? This simple question has a surprisingly complicated answer.

Some persons argue vociferously that the answer is yes. Happy employees have a direct effect on corporate profitability. The primary promoters of this thesis, who are more commonly known as "employees," often see themselves as galley slaves in the corporate yacht. They are forced to sweat thanklessly away as some overpaid dilettante haplessly steers the ship into a reef. All the company's problems would be solved, they believe, if they were paid more, given a little authority, allowed to work their own hours, permitted to wear sandals, and assigned a better parking space.

On the other hand, some persons argue that the answer to the employee satisfaction question is no. Happy employees do not lead to corporate profitability. Instead, they theorize, unhappy employees do. Experience indicates that these people, also known as "overpaid dilettantes," are right. One of the most successful and most admired corporations in the United States has been criticized for making people work overtime without pay, locking them inside stores to minimize distractions, and forcing them to wear ridiculous red vests. Former employees talk about their experience at the company as if it were a cross between the Bataan Death March and a four-year-old's birthday party.

Because of what's at stake, it's incumbent on managers to get a sense of their employees' mood. Those who are clueless about morale may be less successful managers. But more important, they won't be prepared to explain away their people's answers when executives receive the results of the next companywide employee satisfaction survey. If your workers are happier than the underlings of your rival for an upcoming promotion and you can't point out, for instance, that they all took the survey after a quick trip around the block for happy hour, your career is probably headed for the gangplank.

Still, managers must never make the mistake of asking employees whether they're happy. Doing so would imply a willingness to change things if the answer were no. Even the most dimwitted employee, who's incapable of folding your personal communications so the address shows through the envelope window, will see it as an opportunity to gain some concessions. Managers must be subtle and indirect in measuring where employees are on the disgruntled-gruntled scale. They should look for secondary indicators of workers' mood: productivity, enthusiasm over wearing items bearing the company logo, frequency of workplace arson.

Let's assume your covert fact-finding shows that your employees are not displaying a sufficient number of hostility indicators. What can you do quickly and economically to make them as malcontented as workers in our nation's most forward-thinking organizations? Fortunately, your options are as great as your imagination. One manager found that requiring employees to record activities in 15-minute increments did the trick, while another learned that disallowing coffee in the office simultaneously saves money and drains workers of goodwill. If all else fails, random strip searches are an almost foolproof way to adjust attitudes.

In the unlikely event you ever discover that your employees are both happy and productive, you may want to turn to academia for solace. Researchers at Northwestern University's Department of Integrated Marketing Communications are trying to prove statistically that there's a link between employee satisfaction and corporate profits. I hope they're unhappy enough to produce some thoughtful, well-reasoned, really indisputable evidence.

Dan Danbom writes humor for a number of publications. His latest book is "Humor Meets Your Workforce: Make Laughter One of Your Organization's Goals."