Laura’s Winning Ideas

Comment by Sameer Shaikh

May 25, 2007 @ 8:13 am

Hello,

Yes I completely agree with you… What we do as Fun@Work is quite different maybe someone already doing it… we have a Team of 5 members (from various teams and rotating) who we call as “Stress Busters” the activities we do is small games, celebrations, making movies, joke sessions and mimic sessions… all of these and many more things do happen once a week (usually wednesdays) in the evening. This ensures that the team is relaxed for sometime in the work days and hours … apart from this our office has dart boards, basket ball wings, soft toys and toy games to play around with….

Many more things we do out.. and have some more ideas and will definately need more to be shared amongst…

Regards
Sameer
http://pm-better-than-sex.blogspot.com/

Comment by LRicci

June 5, 2007 @ 7:43 am

Sameer,

Great to hear this! I’m sure you have better retention because you are paying attention to the Stress.

Keep going!
Laura Ricci

Comment by Steve Taylor

January 7, 2009 @ 12:11 pm

We had Olympics this past Summer and it was a huge hit. Out of around 70 employees, we probably had 55-60 that participated!

We had table tennis, skeet shooting (Nerf electronic setup that throws discs in the air and than you use Nerf darts to shoot the discs (successful shots stick to the discs), a pie-eating contest, three-legged race, and more. There were events slated for each day that hovered around mid-day and at the end of the week, all of us gathered in our auditorium for an awards ceremony complete with medals that the winners had placed around their necks, standing on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd place stands (set up just like the real olympics) and all were given a rose as well. It was one of the most fun things i’ve ever seen a company do. Our company works very hard and we’re succeeding in this lousy economy and we’re retaining great people because of the many things HR does to attract and retain.

Having fun at work really DOES work in bringing people closer together and improves our overall productivity. My company also keeps pics of all events (we hold several cool events each year) on the server, organized by year and event, so that we can all share them both inside and outside of the organization.

I love your blog, Laura!

Comment by John

March 12, 2009 @ 1:49 pm

Having seven Directors at work at a major recognized global institution during an HR Fun “hour” ,not day, participating in who can eat the most pie contest without using your hands is demeaning at best. My employees even said they do not want that mental image of me so I will not participate. Three legged race yes, ball games sure, nerf darts you bet but sticking my face into pie while my employees see a disgusting mess is not my idea of fun. Plenty of ideas to do to encourage motivation and have fun and loosen up but not this one!

Comment by LRicci

March 12, 2009 @ 5:21 pm

John,

Right. You see what I mean about HR planning events. Somehow the lame, juvenile and goofy get through HR filters. Just how are you supposed to clean up after a pie eating contest?

My preferences veer to Long Paper Toss, file cabinet relay race, and Synchronized office chair ballet.

The closest to humiliating was a contest to decorate a raw egg to emulate one of our four founders, all of which are bald. They seemed to enjoy checking in so the judges could compare the models to the decorated egg entries. Then we used the eggs as passengers in a relay race of egg carriers designed from supplies in our standard office supply cabinets. We wanted to engage the creativity of the graphics department and engineering, and it seemed to work. We nixed the idea of egg carriers to be dropped from a height for testing resilience and protection of the cargo because it would be messy.

I chose the picture for this post as demonstration of joyous fun, not to imply pie eating contests would be a great idea. Some organizations might enjoy that, but no woman would, and no man over 20 would IMHO.