Thursday, March 31, 2011

Employee Morale Ideas

Fun at Work News!

Fun at Work News aims to provide:

Evidence that laughter and fun are good for business.

Fun ideas for training, staff events and meetings.

Ideas and examples to help you add fun and humor to the workplace.

News and Inspiration

Make Training Fun
Make your training or presentation audience fully engaged. Here's how: Review your key points in the form of a challenging game show. There's software to make this easy. It adds all the game show atmosphere for you, so all you do it write your questions and choose options. Try it free.

Cost of Low Morale
Need to convince upper management that low morale is costly and high morale good for investors as well as employees? The book The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want by David Sirota is brimming with news your need. Sirota and colleagues surveyed millions of workers at large companies in recent years and compared morale with stock prices of those firms.
Shares of high-morale companies were up 16 percent in 2004 against an industry average of 6 percent for those companies. On the flip side, low morale companies saw shares rise 3 percent, but the average gain for other companies in the same industries was 15 percent that year. The book is available at Amazon.com.

Elevated Mood
Does playfulness require a lot of preparation? Not if you're doing it right. In fact, playful humor can be as simple as which direction you face. Try this: Next time you board an elevator, do not turn around. Face the back! Better still, enlist a cohort and BOTH of you face the back. Now people who get on at other floors will feel a tremendous urge to conform and face the back, too! Read how E. Scott Geller, Ph.D, Professor, Virginia Tech., elevated his mood this way atwww.safetyperformance.com/humor.html. This kind of playful experimentation led him to make humor a regular part of his work.

Humor and Fun in the Workplace
Mary Rau-Foster, who specializes in workplace issues including employee motivation, wrote this thoughtful piece about the value of humor and fun at work. Among its topics are the benefits of a fun workplace and how to measure the positive impact. See the full article.

Got Skeptics?If you are trying to launch a morale-building initiative at work and find skeptics taking aim at your concepts and ideas, here comes help. Jim Collison, President of Employers of America, offers a rebuttal to an agrument against fun in the workplace. Jim gives plenty of evidence and examples to support the case for fun as a morale -building tool that has real benefits for business. See Encouraging fun at work produces positive results for the full story.