The Super Slider Weekly Update
Our neighbours set up a slip n’ slide in their backyard this morning. It’s on a gentle hill and children squealing with joy has been the soundtrack of the day. That and my neighbour crying in his hands saying, “my lawn, my poor lawn.”
These kids are onto something. Something called fun. Something that may not have been as present in our workplace over the past year and a bit. And whether at the home office or the dress-up office, it’s something we are all hoping will return in force this summer.
Having fun at work has many benefits. It improves workplace relationships, it makes us smarter, it reduces stress and it makes us feel more energetic and useful.
But fun isn’t something we should just let happen organically. Like many things, we can stimulate fun the right way and the wrong way and the reaaaally wrong way. If you force fun, it can become awkward.
Some Mostly Harmless™ ideas:
Before you go back to the office, arrange picnics for teams – find a nice park, bring a potluck and enjoy each other’s presence.
The first Friday back in the office, ask everyone to wear to work what they wore in the home office. Expect a lot of jammy bottoms.
Take a page out of Jimmy Kimmel’s show where celebrities read mean tweets about themselves and do that around the office. Perhaps you can make them COVID-themed.
Ideas in the bad or really bad categories include karaoke parties, escape rooms (isn’t every meeting room an escape room?) and murder mysteries (the only person you want to murder is the organizer).
Fun makes us more relatable and human and that is one of the most important things your brand should be. This often is easy for start-up brands who are imbued with the iconoclastic vision of their founders. As brands mature, being fun gets hard. Social platforms can be a high risk, high reward platform well-suited to create the desired tone:
More than being lighthearted and fun, each of these posts is on-brand.
If you want to be more fun – at work and in the market – your brand should have a pillar focused on fun. It might be playful, irreverent, quirky, passionate or self-deprecating.
As for ourselves, we’re not going for fun. We want “gives you something to think about and puts a smile on your face.” We call it “sparky”. Although if we get “snort coffee all over your keyboard,” we’re happy with that too.
Stay safe. Have fun. Be 96% human.
™ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, revised edition.*
* This may be an obscure reference for some, but it will be really fun for others. One name says it all: Zaphod Beeblebrox.**
** Zaphod invented the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. He was voted "Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe" seven consecutive times. He's been described as "the best Bang since the Big One" by Eccentrica Gallumbits, and as "one hoopy frood" by others. He is the "owner of the hippest place in the universe" (his own left cranium), as voted on in a poll of the readers of the fictional magazine Playbeing. He was briefly the President of the Galaxy.***
*** Now there’s a guy who knows how to have fun at work.