Today’s blog post continues our series of specific ideas for motivating employees. In our last instalment, I told you about a fun approach – to have dress-up and dress-down days. Well, today’s tip has a strong fun factor as well. It is to play games.
Play games
Again, your imagination is the limit. In some of my client organizations, they’ve conducted hallway bowling and hallway golf contests. Some have even held office chair races. By the way, it’s a good idea to use chairs with wheels for this one! Another good one is to post staff baby or high school pictures and guess who they are. And again, let your staff members organize these – planning is half the fun. Your role should be to create an environment in which it’s okay to have fun in this way.
Another word about last time’s video tip
I want to take a moment to address some of the reactions to my last episode about dress-up and dress-down days. Some of you raised concerns about this concept of “workplace fun”. You told me that while you aren’t against employees having fun, you are worried that it might come at the expense of professionalism and performance. “What if my employees start goofing off and lose productivity, or even worse, offend clients and customers,” some of you asked. So let me address that. The proven truth is that when employees look forward to coming to their jobs each day, they are more engaged in their responsibilities and they also perform better on the job. Over and over again, organizational research has shown that when employees have fun at work, they enjoy their jobs more, and that leads to increased employee morale, greater creativity and innovation, higher commitment to the organization, and decreased turnover. The benefits are there, so it is up to you to create an environment in which your employees understand your organizational constraints and so that you can trust them to maintain your brand and your image.
Let’s go back to fun. What are you doing at your workplace to have fun and create highly-motivated employees? C’mon let’s share some ideas with each other.