Snapshot
- Happiness is one of the three key employee stats in Tavern Keeper.
- Maintain optimal employee happiness to avoid Stress Reactions.
- Be mindful of your employees’ preferences and traits to avoid staff unhappiness.
Happiness, along with Movement Speed and Energy, is the main stat for your employees in Tavern Keeper. It’s crucial to maintain a healthy employee happiness level. Here’s how it works in the game.
How to Keep Your Staff Happy in Tavern Keeper?
There are various ways to keep your staff happy. We have compiled several noteworthy ways to ensure that you retain happy employees who do not destroy the reputation (or the structure!) of your tavern.
Assign the roles strategically
Every employee in Tavern Keeper comes with unique personality traits, skill levels, and work-life expectations. While considering hiring them, glean their traits and preferences, and offer them a role that fits in with their various quirks. Always avoid assigning them roles that clash with their traits.
For example, someone who’s squeamish will always struggle if employed as a janitor. Or, an expert chef might become bored and start behaving unprofessionally if hired as a Generalist or Dogsbody. Also, hiring someone with the Clumsy trait as a Dogsbody will lead to him creating more messes than he’s worth!
Manage work hours based on employee skill-tier
Overworking your staff might be one of the key reasons behind their unhappiness. All employees in Tavern Keeper come with a skill-tier-based time limit for work. Cross that limit and make them overwork, and poof! You’ll have a stress reaction.
The following table details skill-tier and the associated maximum work time limit. Schedule your employee to work fewer hours than the mentioned limit, and you’ll have no problem keeping them happy.
| Tier | Work Shift Limit |
| Unskilled Workers | Up to 14 Hours a Day |
| Skilled Workers | Up to 12 Hours a Day |
| Expert Workers | Up to 10 Hours a Day |
Be mindful of their traits and preferences
Each employee who comes to you has a preference and a trait. These traits affect how they behave around your patrons, based on the environment. Employee traits in Tavern Keeper can be beneficial, challenging, or at times, neutral. These include:
| Trait | Description |
| Cannot be bribed | Will refuse any cash bonuses or attempts at bribery |
| Clumsy | Frequently drops things |
| Cold Tolerant | Doesn’t mind the cold environment |
| Darkvision | Can work in the poorly lit areas |
| Dirt Didger | Becomes unhappy when the environment isn’t clean |
| Deep sleeper | Can’t be woken up once they sleep (can sleep near noisy areas) |
| Easily bored | Hates when there’s nothing to do |
| Easily bribed | Becomes happy with half the amount of the cash bonus |
| Fast worker | Has good movement speed |
| Fear of the dark | Becomes unhappy when working in dark areas |
| Filthy | They are covered in dirt at all times |
| Influencer | Their happiness or unhappiness spreads to others |
| Messy | Leaves messes wherever they go |
| Night owl | Prefers night shifts; day shifts make them unhappy |
| Not your puppet | Giving them a direct order makes them unhappy |
| Quick burner | Works faster when fully rested, but speed decreases as the day passes |
| Slowpoke | Moves and works slowly |
| Squeamish | Hates dirt, vomits, and bugs |
| Ticking time bomb | Swings between normal work and occasional violent outbursts (not ideal for customer-facing roles) |
| Wants to sleep in the darkness | Making them sleep during the day makes them unhappy |
Offer proper Staffrooms
Your employees also need a designated area where they can unwind, sleep, use lockers, and prepare for their next shift. The quality and comfort of their staffrooms are important factors when it comes to their happiness levels. Based on their skill tier, all employees have different requirements for staffrooms, as described in the table below:
| Tier | Sharing Preference | Preferred Star Rating of Staffroom |
| Unskilled Workers | Can share with up to 4 people | 1-star room Acceptable |
| Skilled Workers | Can share with up to 2 people | 2-star room Recommended |
| Expert Workers | Cannot share with anyone | 2-star room with a Staff Table Needed |
Offer periodic bonuses
While daily wages are automatically awarded to your employees at midnight, you can also choose to offer them a Bonus (i.e., x2 of their daily wages). Offering your employees a Bonus grants them +10 Happiness for 12 hours. However, you can only offer an individual a Bonus once in 48 hours.
What happens if employees become unhappy?
If stressed by too much unhappiness, your employees may do various kinds of unwanted things, including:
- Stealing gold from you
- Damaging furniture and equipment
- Overeating or over-drinking
- Starting a fight with one of the patrons or other employees
- Going to sleep for an extended period of time
- Quitting the job and leaving the tavern.
FAQs
How can I find out why my employees are unhappy?
Make sure that your employees aren’t working too many hours. Also, check your employees’ traits. The various traits they display and preferences they have (which can be viewed in the bottom-left corner of the screen when you select any employee) can indicate why they may be unhappy.
For example, let’s say that you have an employee who has the ‘Dirt Dodger’ trait, i.e., they become unhappy when too much dirt accumulates. In this particular case, maintaining cleanliness in the tavern is the answer to make them happy once again.
Why are my employees always unhappy?
Select an employee and open the tool that displays their happiness levels. When you see the list of factors making them unhappy, click on the pop-up. This will give you a detailed description of their problems, so you can go about solving them individually.
For example, if you have someone with ‘Does not like it when it’s cold’ expectation, as well as several stoves and heaters all over the place, you might think the game is bugged. However, in this particular scenario, the stoves might need refueling the moment they become empty, or your employee will start getting unhappy.
My staff is unhappy because they’re not sleeping in their assigned bed. What should I do?
You might not have assigned a proper Staffroom based on their skill tier. You cannot make an Expert worker share a staffroom with anyone else. Similarly, you cannot make a Skilled Worker share a room with more than two people. To fix this, simply build them an appropriate staffroom (mentioned in the table above).
What are some of the best tricks to keep my staff always happy?
- Hire an appropriate number of employees, so they don’t get overworked.
- Be mindful about shift timings (do not make someone who hates sleeping during the day work nights and vice versa)
- Do not make your employees work more than 12 hours at a stretch (10 hours in case of expert workers)
- Assign roles based on their traits and shift preferences.
- Assign your staff appropriate Staffrooms and eventually dole out nicer staffrooms than they expect for a boost in happiness levels.
