Are You Having Fun At Work?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, work is “a job or activity that you do regularly especially in order to earn money ”and the definition of fun is “someone or something that is amusing or enjoyable: an enjoyable experience or person.”  One would think that these two words would rarely be used in the same sentence together. I disagree.  If you have the right attitude, every job no matter how mundane, repetitive and boring can be fun if you make it fun.

When I was in high school, I had a part-time job working for my Dad as a janitor. It was my job to dump the garbage and vacuum the office carpet.  It sometimes got a bit tedious when the whole punch pieces were on the floor and the vacuum wouldn’t pick them up, so I had to get on my hands and knees and pick each piece individually. Often my dad would be working late while I was cleaning the office. It was easy for me to look beyond the work because I had an opportunity to watch my Dad work and learn what he did for a living. He would often buy me a Coke from the old-fashioned coke machine (glass bottles) down the hall and we would talk about different things. Although it was work, it was fun for me to spend time with my Dad.

I also had a job working for the city’s service department.  My job was to pull weeds at the city parks, cut grass and make sure all of the tools were clean and in their proper location.  Sometimes I would be dropped off at a park with a few garbage bags and needed to pull weeds all by myself for hours.  I made a conscience effort to have fun while I worked.  I sang songs, thought of funny movies I had seen, listened to the sounds of all of the different types of birds singing or spent time in prayer and meditation while I did my job.  I looked at it as an opportunity to be outside on a beautiful sunny summer day and I was getting paid for it.  Having fun at work all depends on your attitude and perspective.

The business world is the same way.  Do you have fun where you are working?  Do you dread coming to work every day or are you excited to come to work?  It is in the company’s best interest to have employees who love coming to work.  Enthusiasm is contagious.  A happy employee will often project that excitement to customers.  Unfortunately, bad managers can a great company unpleasant to work for.  Despite bad managers or poorly run companies, you can still have fun and make it fun for others.

Here are some suggestions of how you can make your workplace more fun for you and your employees.

• Lunch and Learn – Instead of everyone scattering at noon to run out to the local fast food place for lunch, have them bring their lunches to the lunch room and have a “lunch and learn” session. A different person can volunteer each week or monthly as the teacher and they can present whatever information they want to share with others.  It doesn’t have to be work or job related. It could be talking about a favorite hobby or great places to hike with your family in the area.  Everyone needs a break from work and this is a fun way to take a break.

• Holiday Events – I have worked for some companies that have a lot of fun during holiday events. For example, departments would compete for the best decorated work area during Halloween.  We would have everyone who dressed up parade through the entire company and prizes were awarded for the best costumes.  We would also have the children of employees come through the company visiting each department and collecting candy, apple cider and cookies.  Our Christmas / Holiday parties in December offered live entertainment, a delicious meal and door prizes.  The door prizes were a great way to build excitement and congratulate employees for a successful year.

• Fun Fridays – We also had a series of “Dress-up Fridays” that we called “Fun Fridays” where instead of just wearing jeans on Fridays, we would have “Pajama Parties” where employees come to work in their PJs. We also had “Ugly Sweater Friday”, and “Favorite Sports Team Friday”.  When I was working in Michigan, we would have a Michigan vs Michigan State chili cook-off where employees would bring in their best chili dishes and favorite desserts.  The company would provide chips and soft drinks.  Of course, the desserts were either maize and blue, or green and white to represent each team’s colors.  Employees would also wear their favorite U of M or MSU clothes.

• Lunch Cookouts – We would regularly have summer cookouts during lunchtime where the company would provide hamburgers, hot dogs, buns, condiments, chips, cookies and soft drinks. The management team were the grill cooks and food servers.  It was a great example of servant leadership. It was a welcomed break from being inside all day.

• Sports for Charity – We also created a softball team that would compete with other local companies to raise money for local charities. Any professional sports team would be embarrassed to play as poorly as we did, but it didn’t matter.  It was fun and for a great cause. Oftentimes, other local companies will join in on the festivities by donating money for jerseys, ballpark rental, equipment, and refreshments for the games.  This is a great team building exercise outside of work.

Conclusion

If you are not having fun at work, make it fun.  You don’t have to be a VP of Human Resources to make suggestions and to organize entertaining activities.  They don’t have to be expensive, just enjoyable. Happy employees are your best evangelists of your company and its culture in the marketplace.

If you want to learn more about me, visit my LinkedIn profile, my website, my twitter account and my blog. If you need marketing leadership assistance, let’s connect on LinkedIn.

Photo credit: Be-Younger.com via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Overcoming Adversity

Everyone faces adversity in the workplace and at home.  Whether it’s a co-worker who is jealous of your accomplishments, a vindictive supervisor, an unhappy employee whose daily goal is to make everyone else have a lousy day or a teenager at home who has questionable friends, every day presents a new challenge.  When I face daily challenges, I follow a few simple rules that can make the most difficult day an enjoyable one.

Spirituality/Prayer

Spirituality and prayer can be a powerful force for stress relief. Every day before I go to work and on my way home, I pray for my co-workers, family and friends.  Many of them are facing their own sets of challenges with sick or elderly parents, kids who are in trouble, an abusive spouse, financial stress and the list goes on.  If you think about it, by the time you get to work, there is an incredible dynamic of people of all different backgrounds and experiences, coming to one place to accomplish a goal of making your company perform like a well-oiled machine bringing their own experiences both negative and positive to the workplace.  If that’s not a recipe for prayer, I don’t know what is.  To learn more about the power of prayer and spirituality and how it relates to stress relief, check out this Mayo Clinic article.

Attitude

I have found that attitude has a lot to do with how I react to different experiences throughout the day.  When I go to work with issues and concerns about things happening elsewhere, I find myself bringing baggage with me at work.  It’s like going on a flight.  Check your bags and forget about them until you arrive at your destination.

Let your positive attitude be contagious.  People like being around positive-minded people.  When you surround yourself with people who are negative and every goal is impossible to achieve, you will fail.  Oftentimes, I have found that my attitude and not my co-workers is the thing that is holding back our success.  Don’t let your attitude be the reason why goals aren’t accomplished or why your co-workers are having a bad day.

Give

You’ve heard the old saying “it’s better to give than receive.”  It’s true.  Go to a soup kitchen and help feed the homeless or go to an organization like Habitat for Humanity or the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts of America and work on a community service project.  Reaching out to injured military service personnel like Wounded Warriors or being a volunteer for newly settled Syrian refugees will quickly put things back in perspective.

What does this have to do with adversity at work or home?  Everything.  Organizing a community service project with your co-workers, enables you to build a stronger community both outside your workplace and within your office.

Communicate

Communication within your workplace and at home is very important.  Many misunderstandings stem from miscommunication.  Email is easily misinterpreted.  How many times have you sent what you thought was a clear message only to get responses back that totally misconstrued your original message?

It might make sense to get up from behind your desk, walk over to the person you were sending an email to and have a conversation.  In a world of texts, SnapChat, and online messaging, it’s refreshing to have an “old-fashioned” face-to-face conversation.

Conclusion

Whether you are at work or at home, I recommend starting and ending your day with prayer (sometime you need to keep praying throughout the day especially when it’s an overly challenging one), have a positive attitude, have a charitable heart giving back to your community whenever you can and keep your lines of communication open and clear.  Using these simple guidelines can help anyone successfully deal with adversity.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Photo credit: jlwo via Foter.com / CC BY-NC

How to clean a dirty customer database

How many people do you know that enjoy cleaning dishes after a party or family get together?  Not many.  To me, cleaning a customer database is very similar.  It needs to be done, but not many people like doing it.  At one company where I worked, the executive management team didn’t believe in cleaning customer data.  They would just continue to buy lists without de-duping.  They would throw tens of thousands of dollars away every time they mailed a flier, brochure or catalog.  Keeping a database clean isn’t cheap, but well worth the investment.  As I suggested in my article “Clean Customer and Product Data – Your Pot of Gold”, your customer data is one of the most valuable assets that you have and you must protect it.

Here’s a process that has worked well for me that helped keep our customer database clean.  This is by no means the only database cleansing method, but it works well.

1. Create a “Key” using zip code (3 or 5 digits) and primary address (sometimes all, sometimes the first 14 characters or so).
2. The Key record will look something like “505011234MAINSTSW” while the zipcode field still reads “50501-1578” and the primary address record still reads “1234 Main Street S.W.”.  (We could still use the address information when we generated the address labels, since we know that the list will get CASS and NCOA (National Change of Address) processing by the mailer if we wanted to get any sort of postage discount.)
3. If the list hasn’t been CASS certified (Coding Accuracy Support System) yet, we would standardize the Key by doing a global search and replace on things like “Road”, “Street”, and “North”, and change them to standard postal abbreviations like “Rd”, “St”, and “N”. Then we would strip special characters from the Key: dashes, periods, commas, pound signs, and spaces.
4. When you sort by the Key, then by contact name, a formula can be written in Excel to compare addresses, and use segments of the contact name and/or company name to identify duplicates.
5. By doing visual checks of a few hundred records, you can usually tell if the formulas need to be tweaked and if additional processing of the records needs to be done.
6. Concerning demographics and customer value, we use SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) and NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) to help target customers, and tallying sales activity of defined time periods help classify the accounts.  Because we had the luxury of a SQL database, that information was stored within the database and updated as needed. We could identify the SIC or NAICS hot spots in the customer database for target marketing.
7. Phone or e-mail contact with the customer helped keep the contact list up-to-date.  Because the customer service reps would associate an order with a caller by leveraging a SQL database, we could use the data to help identify active contacts, (who placed orders, how often were orders placed, and the date of their last activity).  This activity helped pinpoint when a contact went cold, and helped us identify who to ask for when calling to clean up the list.

After cleaning up the database and before we mailed an expensive piece like a 1,000 page catalog, we would do a smaller mailing to that same list to see what got returned.  We would clean up the list using that information and then we would be ready for our mailing of a more expensive piece.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Your Holiday Survival Guide

It’s that time of year again.  Before the Halloween decorations were taken down at the stores, the Christmas trees were already up.  Rock music stations were already switching their music to holiday music on November 1st.  It seems that retailers want you to get in the buying mood earlier and earlier every year.  Commercialism is everywhere just as Charlie Brown described almost 50 years ago in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.  Bob Rivers released a funny song called the “Twelve Pains of Christmas” several years ago that sums up how some people feel about the holidays.

Here are my top 10 recommendations of how you can survive the holidays.

1. Make sure you tell your parents, in-laws, grandparents or whoever prepares the Christmas dinner in your house that it’s delicious. Even if the turkey is left-over from Thanksgiving, the lasagna is overcooked and the mashed potatoes look like the cottage cheese.  They worked very hard on the meal.  I recommend that you tell them early in the meal or you will get KP duty and will be doing the dishes long after Uncle Joe and Aunt Audrey have gone to bed.
2. Don’t mess with tradition. If you do certain things every year, regardless of how redundant it seems, keep doing them.  One year we decided to change the Christmas menu from ham and lasagna to boiled fish.  We barely survived the meal.  Needless to say the old tradition returned and thankfully without bloodshed toward the family member who suggested changing the tradition that year.
3. When you get a fruitcake, look at it as a piece of history. It’s probably been around a lot longer than you have.  Graciously accept it, re-wrap it and send it on to the next victim.
4. Don’t get stressed over sending Christmas cards. Some families send 10-page letters updating you on Baby Sally’s first dirty diaper. I always enjoy receiving Christmas cards from people I don’t even know.  I think some people send Christmas cards to random people just to mess with them.  I like the JibJab online Christmas cards.  They are funny and easy to send.  It gives you more time to stress out about something else.
5. Listen to Christmas music and let it take you back to your childhood. When I was growing up, we had several albums (for anyone under 30, you call them “vinyls”) that we listened to every year.  There was a great collection of Christmas music that you could purchase from your local Firestone store.  I really like Volume 3.  Hopefully, the music can take you back to less stressful times.  In my opinion, they don’t make Christmas albums like this anymore.
6. Bake Christmas goodies. Nothing smells better than freshly baked Christmas cookies, pies and cakes.  My mom used to make poppy seed and nut rolls and pineapple icebox cake.  I can still smell and taste those delicious treats.  Baked goods seem to put everyone in a good mood.  Every year, we bake a birthday cake for Jesus.  No we don’t put over 2,000 candles on the cake.  It’s against fire regulations in most states.  Since it is Jesus’ birthday we are celebrating, we like to remember Him.  It helps keep things in perspective for the holidays.
7. For those who live in snowy areas, enjoy the beauty. Go ride a horse-drawn sleigh and drink some hot chocolate. Forget that it’s 40 below zero and you won’t see spring flowers until August.  Last year, I was in West Michigan where we had seven foot snow drifts.  That’s a dusting if you live in Buffalo.  For those in warm places like Florida, feel sorry for everyone else who is shoveling and salting their driveways every 15 minutes.
8. Go “clipping” on Christmas Eve. Clipping is the art of gently nudging another person’s shopping cart and making it look like it was an accident or better yet, go unnoticed.  The more carts you clip, the more points you get.  If it’s obvious to the victim or your competition, you lose points. Let’s face it, the people who are shopping on Christmas Eve aren’t very organized.  Their stress level is through the roof along with all of the other last minute shoppers. People are out there like Arnold Schwarzenegger was in “Jingle All The Way.” There are some people out there more stressed than you are.  My siblings and I used to purposely go out clipping on Christmas Eve, and then we would go into a store separately, act like we didn’t know each other and start fighting over the same item.  It was wildly entertaining to all of the other stressed out people in the store.
9. Don’t fight over the bathroom. When you have 30 relatives staying with you including Uncle Frank who has irritable bowl syndrome all from 6 different families fighting over the one bathroom with questionable plumbing, relax.  There are 24-hour stores all over the place with bathrooms.  It will give you an excuse to escape the chaos for an hour or so.  All of this will pass.  No pun intended.
10. Go to a Christmas Eve or Christmas Day church service. I went to a Jesuit high school and we used to have the most beautiful midnight mass services on Christmas Eve.  This candlelight service was very peaceful.  At midnight, we would blow the candles out and they would have several trumpets play “Joy to the World”.  Just make sure you don’t eat too much Christmas Eve or you’ll end up snoring during the candlelight service.  Not good.  We would come home and watch the Pope saying midnight mass and have cooked kielbasa after the mass.  Don’t ask me why, but it was another tradition we just didn’t mess with.  I’m sure you have some unique traditions in your family.  Remember point number 2, don’t mess with tradition.

This time of year is supposed to focus on the birth of Christ, giving and sharing.  It’s a time for family and friends, warm thoughts and warm hearts.  When the chaos, family disagreements and stress of the holidays starts to get you down, take a deep breath, smile a lot and enjoy the holidays for what they were intended to be.

Stay Positive, Be Patient and Persevere

Things don’t always go the way you planned.  Let’s face it, you will have your share of good days and bad days.  Everyone around you has good days and bad days. It’s not unique to just you.  It’s a fact that you can’t control what you can’t control. When people around me have a bad day, they often take their frustrations out on me, and then I start to have a bad day.  Being negative is like a cancer that spreads.  Bad, negative things will happen.  The key is how you handle it when it comes your way.  Having a positive attitude is key.

When was the last time you said to yourself “I want to be miserable today, so I’m going to hang with someone who is already miserable?”  I would imagine not very often.  People don’t like to be around people who are going to bring them down.  Stay positive even when negative things happen.

I know a man named Bob who has been blind for most of his life due to a disease that took away his sight at a young age.  He could be miserable or angry, but he isn’t.  He’s one of the most positive, inspiring people that I know.  His positive attitude and faith in God are an inspiration to everyone around him.

Successful people stay positive despite setbacks.  Thomas Edison once said “I have not failed.  I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  Edison took a positive spin on a negative situation and he didn’t give up.

Here are some tips that I use to keep positive.

• Volunteer and serve others – It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself when you have a bad day, but remember to serve those who are less fortunate than you to keep things in perspective. Helping others is a great way to get rid of negative thoughts.
• Speak positively about those around you – Don’t repay evil with evil. If someone says something negative, say something positive back.
• Smile – It sounds trivial, but it works. Regardless of how bad things seem, it will turn around. Smile through the tough times.
• Laughter is good medicine – Watch a funny movie or if you don’t have time, watch a funny scene on YouTube.
• Talk to a friend or family member – I find that talking things over with a friend or family member helps me put things back into perspective.
• Pray – Talking to God about what is bothering you is also important. He listens all the time.  Prayers do get answered.

Finally, when things start getting negative, stay positive. Be strong and courageous.  Remember, when the glass is half empty, it’s really half full and you can fill it to overflowing with a positive attitude and taking positive actions in your life.

Stay positive, be patient and persevere.