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

Encourage Your Team To Be Great

One of the best lessons that I have learned in my career is that I cannot do everything myself.  Although sometimes it is easier to just do something myself, it isn’t always the best solution.  I have found that if you surround yourself with talented people that know more than you do, your leadership can help them shine and in turn, you will succeed.  Here are a few key things that I recommend doing to build strong teams.

Be Encouraging  – The old saying that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar is true.  With the stress and pressure of business today, team members sometimes just need an encouraging word to help them move forward.  We often take for granted how far a kind word can go toward your team.

Listen to Your Team – The best leaders that I have worked with are great listeners.  You don’t have to know all of the answers.   You need to ask the right questions.  I have learned more from listening to my team than giving direction.  If you have a strong team, they will appreciate when you listen to their point of view especially if it is different than your own.

Be a Role Model – Be available to roll up your shirtsleeves and help your team.  Many managers I have worked with have treated their team as subordinates and not partners.  They know you are their leader, you don’t have to continuously remind them of that.  They will appreciate you more if you are a team player instead of a dictatorial boss.

Respect Their Family Time – I treasure the time I spend with my wife and kids.  Why would I ever think that my teammates don’t treasure their time with their families?  Everyone needs time to deprogram, relax and recharge.  If a member of your team needs personal time, give it to them.  They will return with a more positive attitude.

Have a Positive Attitude – Negative people are hard to work with and more importantly to work for.  My mother used to say if you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all.  I take that saying one step further, if you can’t say something nice about someone, dig deeper and find something nice to say.  If you display a positive outlook, your team will feed on it.

Be Their Advocate – Nothing helps build a stronger team than having their back.  Just listening to your staff isn’t enough.  You need to take action on what they tell you and give your team the resources and tools they need to succeed.  That’s not to say that you can or should take action on every request that doesn’t make sense. For the things that do make sense, show your team that you are behind them and in front of them is very important.

Your team needs and deserves your appreciation, respect, admiration and leadership.  If you encourage, listen, be a role model, respect, have a positive attitude and be their advocate, your team will be strong, supportive, respectful and will follow your lead.

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

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.

The Elements of Leadership

My last post about leadership talked about Bo Schebechler’s famous speech to his Michigan football team called “The Team, The Team, The Team.”  It emphasizes putting The Team ahead of everyone else including the head coach.  Servant leadership is a key element to strong effective leadership.  I’m going to highlight some other elements that I feel are equally important.

One of the foundations of being a good leader is honesty.  You need to be honest with your team, your customers and yourself.  How many times have we read about companies that made millions or billions of dollars only to find that the company as built on a smoke-screen of lies.  Enron’s C-level management stole $74 billion from shareholders.  Honesty is always the best policy.

Another very important element of good leadership is integrity.  Not only being honest, but having a good, strong moral character is key.  Leaders who have questionable moral character have that dark cloud over their heads.  Do you know what the leaders in your company stand for and believe in?  If you don’t, find out.

Tied very closely with integrity is trust.  Leaders with questionable integrity are difficult to trust.  Immorality is the enemy of business.  We’ve all done the test of trust at team building events when you fall backwards and trust that the person behind you is going to catch you.  You have to trust that the person behind you is going to catch you.  It’s the same in business.  It is much easier to do business with people you know and trust.

One element that is often forgotten is compassion.  Are your leaders compassionate to others? Do they contribute to charitable organizations with time and talents in your community?  How are your leaders giving back to the community?  Have you ever seen or can you envision your leaders working in a soup kitchen to help those less fortunate?  Do you serve your community?

To be a leader, you need to be courageous.  They take chances and do things that others won’t.  They are brave facing strong competition and are often criticized, but still stand strong through adversity.

One of the key drivers of any good leader is passion.  The leaders that have impressed me the most are ones that have a fire in their belly about what they are doing.  They love what they do and love doing it with the team around them.  If you don’t love what you are doing, do yourself and your team a favor.  Do something else.

The best, most effective leaders that I have observed are overflowing with humility.  Arrogance is another enemy of business.  Leaders don’t know everything.  Some leaders think that they have to always have the answers.  Good leaders don’t, but they do know where to get them. Good leaders have a great deal of experience and expertise, but they realize that they don’t know everything.  They surround themselves with talented people that are experts in their fields.  It is through this diverse and talented team who offer recommendations and suggestions to the leader that the leader grows and helps the team and the company grow.

The final element of good leadership is being experienced. You can implement all of the elements of leadership above, but if you don’t have the hands-on experience in the marketplace, you are trying to lead from theories and concepts, not real-world trials and tribulations.  A good leader is battle-tested.  They’ve been there, done that.  The other leaders of the company should be battle tested too so when they come together to lead the organization, their collective experiences should be shared and best practices should be gleaned from them.

To summarize, the elements a good leadership are:

• Servant – Serving others and putting the team first
• Honesty – Being honest with your team, your customers and yourself
• Integrity – Be of strong ethical and moral character
• Trust – Trust your team and be trustworthy
• Compassion – Give of your time and talents to those who need it in your community
• Courageous – Be brave and fight what you believe in
• Passion – Love what you do and appreciate those around you.  Passion is contagious.
• Humility – Humble yourself.  You don’t know everything.  Surround yourself with people who you can learn from.
• Experienced – Learn and grow from your experiences.

People like Bo Schembechler, Ronald Reagan, Pope Francis and others have demonstrated these elements and helped make them very effective leaders.

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