Having Fun at Work (Part 1)
By: Karl Schott
Raise your hand if you’d die for a chance to work at Google! Many of you are probably familiar with Google’s heralded work environment. If you’re not, spend a few minutes and watch this video about it on YouTube, then come back to us here at Dexcomm Today.
Okay, all done?
Great. Slides and fire poles. Video games. Free sushi. Health care professionals in the office. Countless other perks right? This is a dream come true.
Unfortunately most of us don’t have annual revenues upwards of $5 billion. Our costs dedicated to things like health insurance, payroll, bonuses, etc. don’t leave much in order to satisfy a basic need of our human resources. That basic need is fun. We want to create a work environment here at Dexcomm that is obviously professional and customer-focused, but we don’t believe that’s possible if employees can’t have a little fun in the process. Who wants to come to work five days a week or more to some dour, drab environment where everyone is always grumpy?
How do you do this on the cheap?
First you have to commit to it. We identified fun as a core value to foster and promote in our office. We understand “fun” is something of a nebulous term that may have vastly different meanings to any two people, but we expect our management, staff, and new hires to seek out ways to have fun at work that don’t pull them away from our primary duties to our customers. Identifying how individuals have fun and finding ways to give them that outlet during the work day is difficult and an ongoing process. Office competitions that start out as a blast to 15 employees may get old if they don’t change or evolve over time. Seeking out constant feedback and suggestions from staff is a great way to remain on your toes about morale.
The hiring process must absolutely involve the identification of what satisfies a prospect’s desire for fun. Some people use personality profiles, some people simply ask the question, “how do you have fun in your daily life?” Determine that a prospect is a good fit for your office culture and it will help continue to keep your environment “fun.”
I’ll have some more suggestions for creating a fun work environment over the next few weeks. I don’t claim expertise in the matter, and we have a long way to go at Dexcomm to develop the environment we truly desire, but we’re committed. I’d love your suggestions.
Comments (1)
there are things that help morale, like actual casual dress days and long breaks that help morale a lot. There’s also monetary incentives for doing a good job, not just semi-yearly raises but montly bonuses for exceptional performance or smaller pay increases at more regular intervals showing value to those who do their jobs well. Gossip can be a problem at some offices but at the same time telling people not to talk can be terrible for morale, so it’s a fine line you have to walk as far as that goes. Sweep stakes and games like what have been suggested on other posts on this forum can help but honestly seem like more of a stop gap measure than actually pay increase or promotion to the employee. The worst thing for an employee’s morale in my opinion is for them to see people they know do not perform as well being treated better than them while they are feeling underappreciated at the same time.