How to get the sticker for staff happiness?

[Kessra]

So, one of the last things I'm missing out is that 96% overall happiness rating on my staff. I have zoned out my museum into multiple areas and made sure I have like 1 or 2 additional staff members as replacements assigned to those zones to allow people to go on break. I increased their wages to get 13-15% boost to happiness and still I only get to around 89% overall happiness even though I sent them all on break at the same time. They rather continue with their work and I constantly list them by happiness and send the one whose happiness drops below 90%. Granted, I'm playing on a 6 star museum with >1000 visiotors at the moment and I can't have enough employees to battle the waste they drop even though I have waste bins like every 5m and still I get the critique that I don't have enough of those.

I currently have the impression that this is something one can only do at the early stages of the game before staff has to actually do work because as soon as they leave the break room or start to work their happiness quickly drops to below 96% so that an average of 96% seems to be impossible at that scale.

[GhostWolfe]

It is definitely easier when you’re just starting out and all of your staff are freshly hired; but you can get your finances to the point that you can start paying them really well, and that helps a lot. You can also use Happy Thoughts training, and when you’re close to your target, sending everyone on a break manually will give you a small boost.

[Kessra]

My problem is that I'm in a really, really late game and most of my staff is level 15 and above and has already received plenty of training. Sure, I can fire and rehire them but that's a bit insane and time consuming.

Money isn't an issue on this map as I get like 100k even with maxed out wages per month and I'm sitting on several millions already

My current thoughts are to replace most of the janitors and security people with robots as they have 100% happiness anyway while keeping a couple of "humans" for particular tasks. Then it just boils down to experts and assistants. As I more or less finished collecting all exhibits from a particular map I could get rid of most "trained up" expedition experts which would reduce the number of experts I have to satisfy by like 5 (+/- 1 or 2). Pausing or getting rid of all the tours I have (I have like 6 or 7 which I just have because they are all 5 stars and for the bonus they give to the visitors; the income of these is rather laughable and tour guids moan about being thursty and hungry all the time anyway) should further reduce the number of people to satisfy. This then would mean taking mostly care of like 45 assistants and a hand full of experts and other folks that could not get replaced by robots. This whole process though would probably take additional 100-150h till I replaced most of them with robots and trained up "updated" experts and assistants. And even then, it is not really certain that all that stuff really helps to get that last sticker I'm missing.

For some odd reason I can't place my staff in a dedicated break room I made to force them all into break by placing them there. I then tried to use the break button on each of the employees though most of them just continue their work and ignore my setting even though their state states that they go on break. That's why no matter what I tried, I never was able to get above 89% happiness.

[Kessra]

Ok, I got the sticker now in a sandbox game on hardcore settings. The trick was to not open the museum by recruiting an assistant and basically live on the monthly 5k subsidy and start fishing for employees with perfect traits. I recruited a janitor with loyal and fast traits, maximized his income and sent him on training to get that happy thoughts training which grants him the last 15% needed to cap on 100% (+10% for the actual happy thoughts training and +5% for satisfying the need for training). As no customers were in yet, this was fairly easiy to accomplish but required a dedicated approach to get to that.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3464616774

This trick of not "opening" the museum allows to at least fish for staff with (near) perfect traits and collect money beyond what you initially have selected (50k on hardcore f.e.). But keep them in the queue and just remove the ones you don't want. Volunteers are only kicked out when you have a full queue and new entries will basically lead to the one on the top of the queue to get kicked out when the queue is full. As long as you keep the queue not filled up, you can keep people there potentially forever. While this may take some month if not years to find the appropriate staff and "earn" enough to actually be able to save up enough money to really add needed rooms or decorations, as long as your costs of current employees does not exceed those 5k monthly subsidies, you can really take your time perfecting your start experience.

I honesty don't see how this could be done in later stages of the game unless you've trained all your staff with 2 or 3 levels of happy thoughts and sendng them all on break right at the same time, which they also won't do as long as visitors are in the museum. Probably tearing everything down, waiting for the visitors to disappear and then start from anew could be the trick here.

[GhostWolfe]

Honestly, this is a bit excessive in early game. If you know that you want to do this before you start, you can just make your first 3-4 staff happy with good pay and no training. Fire them after, if you want to, but no need to wait for perfect staff or use Happy Thoughts that early on because they start out pretty happy.

[Kessra]

No, you need to do the training. I've tried this for some time and if you recruite someone and just max out his/her salary, send him/her on break and max out anything they demand, you end up at 85% max happiness. For the sticker you need to have 97% average satisfaction. You can't reach this with "normal" gameplay. Even more so when "globetrotter" is bugged and doesn't grant the promised 25% happiness boost.

During normal gameplay you even face further penalties like nearby trash, depleted status bars like hunger, thirst and so froth and/or other penalties. They have a way bigger influence on staff happiness then I initially thought.

I'm not 100% sure how the happiness "bar" actually works behind the scenes. It seems that employees have a base 50% happiness and the boost brings you closer to the 100%. So if you have +50% boost combined you can reach 100%. Any malus on the other hand reduces the happiness by that stated number. So, if you're not maxing out on salary for that employee, you don't get those 15% boost. But then again, I have seen numbers where the boost and maluses didn't allign to that 50% base happiness and the current happiness of the employee.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3464653431

In the screenshot above you can see a boost of +31% and -4% malus which in total should lead to a boost of 27%. Given the theory of 50% base happiness + 27% through combined boosts should end up with 77% happiness but the employee just has 74% somehow 3% are missing for whatever reason.

When no malus is listed, numbers line up:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3464658389
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3464658486

but as soon as a malus is in the list, there is an additional 3% hit on the employees happiness:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3464658588

[GhostWolfe]

Originally posted by Kessra:

No, you need to do the training. I've tried this for some time and if you recruite someone and just max out his/her salary, send him/her on break and max out anything they demand, you end up at 85% max happiness. For the sticker you need to have 97% average satisfaction. You can't reach this with "normal" gameplay. Even more so when "globetrotter" is bugged and doesn't grant the promised 25% happiness boost.

I’m only saying that the Happy Thoughts training is overkill because I have the sticker and I didn’t do it that way. It’s been too long and I don’t know exactly what I did, but I didn’t work this hard for it.

[-Digital¹]

Originally posted by GhostWolfe:

Originally posted by Kessra:

No, you need to do the training. I've tried this for some time and if you recruite someone and just max out his/her salary, send him/her on break and max out anything they demand, you end up at 85% max happiness. For the sticker you need to have 97% average satisfaction. You can't reach this with "normal" gameplay. Even more so when "globetrotter" is bugged and doesn't grant the promised 25% happiness boost.

I’m only saying that the Happy Thoughts training is overkill because I have the sticker and I didn’t do it that way. It’s been too long and I don’t know exactly what I did, but I didn’t work this hard for it.

Probably same way i did, by accident. I decided to renovate the paranormal museum, firing everyone and destroying everything. Yeah, Wailon... impossible for him to not be super happy.

[GhostWolfe]

It wasn’t by accident, but it was at the very beginning of a level. I’d read all the available stickers (I got this shiny before unlocking all the possible stickers) and knew that when I started my next museum I would try for it.

Maybe I did it at Wailon Lodge and our ghost friend is helping skew the results.