Office Space is my all time favorite movie. I think I've seen it a dozen times.
really psychological survival in the day to day is more the priority, but maybe if my biggest problem was boredom then having fun could be a priority (which sounds like a nice problem to have, however I know boring jobs are often dead-end jobs and that just leads to being an unemployed person noone wants to interview in the long run, so I get out of those situations - bad for the resume know what I mean?).
Oh my answers on a days off work is I forget work to a remarkable degree (not 100% as I'm permanently always on-call and so literally have to check daily what's going on at work, whether it's a work day or not, every single day, but ... other than that I forget about work to a degree that's almost bad for me even though it does increase my happiness at the time - but I probably learned it long ago as a coping technique - it is not afterall the first time I've been in this type of work situation, though I thought last time was the last time).
Trees don't grow on money
Lots of people chitchat or look at social media on their smartphones especially before the boss is in, while he's at lunch, or when he's on the phone.
The company sponsors certain things some of which benefit them. For instance if you want to wear jeans on a particular Friday you have to donate $5 to breast cancer research and also wear pink. The company gets a PR benefit by bragging about how much they donated to the cause, when it's the employees' money. And if you don't participate you are thought less of.
It's been a while, but here's a few we did:
- baby photo contest. We each brought in a photo of ourselves as babies, and gave them to the admin across the hall. She was the only one who knew whose was whose. She numbered them and posted them on the board, and everyone had to guess to match up the photo with the co-worker. Pretty funny.
- penny icebreaker. We had a dish of pennies and each co-worker picked one. Then we went around the room and they had to say what they were doing in the year that was on the date of the penny.
- one co-worker had a 6-week assignment in Canada. When it was over he returned to find his office decorated in Canadian-friendly theme: Large photos of Canadian Mounties, maple-flavored candy, the Canadian anthem on his office door, fake maple leaves scattered about, etc.
- some departments have a friendly competition on weight loss. They had teams of 3 and had creative names for their teams. The company nurse kept track so weigh-ins were private and only the final total of team weight loss was known.
- we had a shelf of mostly fiction paperbacks that was a take one/leave one. I know some workplaces have a "free" table where people bring in small items for others, like maybe a lotion they were gifted and didn't like, a bag of coffee when they are non-coffee drinkers. Easy to share and also declutter your own stuff.
- several co-workers used to do some epic summer vacations, like motorcycle trips in South America or wilderness trekking in Alaska. They would pick a lunchtime on everyone's calendar in the fall and we'd see their photos and hear some funny and interesting stories.
- Oscar predictions. Try to correctly predict the Oscar winners. (a friend won this 3 years in a row - she's an Oscar savant..)
We have done the baby photo one! Many laughs!Originally Posted by Lainey
The penny one, I like!
At my work we also created a Kudos Wall where there are pics of us and people attached congrats or words of encouragement to each other. The wall itself was named after two colleagues who everyone likes and admires. Mike and Michael's Wall of Pure Business. haha
We also have nicknames. Most people have nicknames. For instance, mine is "Jaggy" (because my middle name is Jaguar). Other nicknames of coworkers are:
"RayMar"
"The James"
"J-Mack"
"Bad & Boujee"
"Weave Zees"
"Pure Business Machine"
"Deer Doe"
"Dee Jay Millah"
To name a few...
We have a betting pool to wager on each year's winning bid rate for our bond issue.
Our budget season opens with a little skit put on by the budget analysts.
I compose and deliver a poem for the retirement party for my staff members. They have titles like "Hard Close", "Defined Benefit", "Moral Hazard" and "Due Diligence."
Assigning nicknames here might get you in trouble with HR.
I'll bet those poems are hilarious!
I immediately had the same thought about "nicknames." As a manager I wouldn't support that, that could turn sideways pretty quickly.
It's amazing how quickly skilled professionals can turn "all in good fun" into "a hostile work environment". Not worth the risk.
We also had our annual end-of-the-year potluck. A simple lunchtime get-together for a dozen of us in the conference room, usually the first Friday in December. We'd ask everyone to have ready a favorite movie clip, Youtube video or silly URL (all SFW naturally). Then someone would bring in their laptop and as we ate we got to watch anything from comedy skits (see Brian Regan's "I Walked on the Moon") to sections of movies like "My Cousin Vinny" to sites like badlipreading.com Pretty funny, looked forward to it every year.
I think these efforts to socialize in the office, if they're kept light and informal, can pay off. Since it's a setting that workers have to be M-F for most of their waking hours, then it makes things more pleasant all the way around by connecting as human beings and not just fellow cogs in the machine.
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