Monday Tip: Workplace fun and games

Your mission this Monday is to have some fun at work. Even Tom Peters thinks this is an absolute necessity:

Don’t do it [work] unless it’s fun.
Make it fun. (Always possible, per me.)
Make it fun for others. (Which makes it fun/more fun for you.)
– Tom Peters (source)

How do you make work fun? Here are a few ideas you can try out this Monday.

Amber recommends Silly Putty.

I bought a pound of Silly Putty in bulk and gave a chunk to each of my team. It is amazing the pen holders, stress relievers, sculptures, etc. that have evolved. Well worth the $15!

Shel recommends candy and workplace toys:

I put a bowl of peppermint lifesavers (you can buy them in bags, individually wrapped for hygene) on my desk. Lots of people stop by and grab one – which has lead to some great conversations – work and other wise. I also have a Rubic’s Cube, a Magic 8 Ball, and this bizarre plastic ball made up of geometric parts that cause it to flip inside out (changing its colour) when tossed in the air, a mini Zen garden, and other items to busy one’s hands while talking – or just hanging out. It’s a great way to create a relaxing atmosphere!

I’ve always been partial to foosball myself, but maybe that’s too Silicon Valley, dot-com-boom for your workplace.

If you need inspiration, there are plenty more toys here…

How do you create some fun at work? Write a comment, I’d really like to know!

The Chief Happiness Officer’s Monday tips are simple, easy, fun things you can do to make yourself and others happy at work and get the work-week off to a great start. Something everyone can do in five minutes, tops. When you try it, write a comment here to tell me how it went.

Previous monday tips.

Comments

11 responses to “Monday Tip: Workplace fun and games”

May 21, 2007

Alper

I just played a couple of matches of Wii tennis with colleagues this afternoon. It is instinctively fun and easy to learn and it gets everybody moving and active. Nice tip for any workplace.
May 21, 2007

Jason of “Kim & Jason”

We have had funny hat day. Everyone comes to staff meeting in a funny hat. Believe me, it’s pretty hard NOT to have fun or take ourselves too seriously.
May 23, 2007

Alexander

Alper: Wii tennis – why didn’t I think of that :o)

Jason: Funny hat day – that’s a great idea. Do you think clown nose day might work too..?
May 23, 2007

Dennis

At our it-helpdesk department there is a team telephone for user support requests. The telephone call can be redirected by a simple key push on each employees personal phone. Now and then we use to play a game which works like this:

If a user calls the team telephone, each employee… uhm.. player has to reroute the call as fast as possible to his or her personal telephone and answer it. Every time a player succeeds to answer a call, he/she gets a marker on the public highscore (usually a big whiteboard). At the end of a day or at the end of a week the highscore will be reset.

This is quite funny, and I never saw people answering phone calls with such an enthusiasm and fun. A nice sideffect is, that in the moment in wich the employee wins the call, he/she is usually so happy about it that he’s also very kind when greating the caller.
May 23, 2007

Tom Nixon

Alex, you seriously cannot beat a packet of fake moustaches:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nixonmcinnes/sets/72157600011040239/
May 31, 2007

Sarah Yeoh

After taking a day off work I came back to the office to find that I had had several complaints about my desktop wallpaper. (A lovely image of the Jocelyn Wildenstein). When changing the wallpaper I decided to let one of my colleagues choose my desktop wallpaper for the week. Now, each week I’m letting someone else choose my next desktop wallpaper. It seems to have inspired some friendly rivalry amongst the sports fans in the office. :-)
October 23, 2007

Melinda Vazquez

Well you see working as Patient registration and financial services in the Emergency dept, making the workplace fun can be difficult. We have recently changed our work description making it a lot harder to implement fun activities. I have created in the past a Bingo Game, which was based on collections. It made alot of reps hustle to make certain dollar amount collections and actually made them like that part of thier job at the time. It worked really well and alot (but not all) of the employees participated. I was able to also create department based word searches and crossword Puzzles.
April 23, 2009

Srinivas

I am conducting fun@work in my work place every Friday..
every week i have to draft a mail and send it across..
it seems to be deficult to host a new game so kindly help me on this behalf…

Thank you
June 1, 2009

Brenda Greika

I have done a “Who Am I?” e-mail contest. I ask office members to write a paragraph about themselves with little-known information. As keeper of the e-mail paragrpahs, I would send them around to everyone (one in teh moring, one in the afternoon for a week-long celebration) to guess who the paragraph was describing. In doing so, we discovered someone in our office had won an Emmy, another ran tobacco sewing machines, one walked on the great wall, another did bare-back trick riding on horses! Who knew? You get the idea. It is a very fun way to get folks to know each other in a more interestingn way than just work.
August 27, 2009

Marie

At work, we deal with customers face to face all day long, so it is impossible for us to actually get together and do activities during the work day, but it doesn’t stop us from having fun.

One thing we always have fun doing is playing BINGO. Whoever the team leader is (we rotate this every 2 months), is the number caller, and in the morning passes out 2 bingo cards to everyone. Throughout the day the team leader draws numbers and e-mail them (about 5 at a time) to everyone. Whoever gets BINGO first, get to pick a prize from the prize bag. The prize bag is all stuff that people donate, usually pens, cool post-it notes, $5 gift cards, etc.

We also play hangman to raise money for the office fun box. The money from the office fun box is used to buy donuts or bagels for meetings, to buy prizes for the prize bag, things like that. So the team leader will draw a handman on the whiteboard in the break room, and in order to guess a letter, you have to donate to the fun box.

We also make sure to get together outside of work. We will go bowling, or play mini golf where our families can come along. It makes everyone closer, and makes the people you work with friends instead of co-workers, and that always makes work more fun.
January 5, 2012

bhavani

am conducting fun@work in my work place every Friday..
every week i have to draft a mail and send it across..
it seems to be deficult to host a new game so kindly help me on this behalf