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

Why Isn’t Your Entire Company On LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is best known as the place where professionals network with other professionals.  With over 400 million members, LinkedIn has built a very large network that you can take advantage of.  The concept is pretty simple.  I’m sure you’ve heard of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon.  The concept is that any two people are six people or fewer acquaintance links apart from each other.  By creating this large network of professionals, you have the opportunity to connect with any professional that you want to using LinkedIn.  This tool allows you to easily find contacts at other companies and discover who you are connected with that may be able to introduce you to those contacts.  Here are some suggestions on how you can benefit from having a LinkedIn presence for your company and how your employees can help your company grow using LinkedIn.

Create Your Own Company Profile   – If you haven’t done so already, create a company profile on LinkedIn.  It’s really easy to do and along with your other social media networks, you will have more visibility to more customers.  If you don’t know where to start, I recommend reviewing some very impressive LinkedIn business pages including Microsoft , Google, Salesforce, and Harvard Business Review.  According to LinkedIn, these companies have a few things in common that have made them very successful.

• 99% of the top global brands have employees sharing their content to their networks
• 97% of the top global brands have employee posts contributing to their content efforts
• 99% of top brands regularly share updates on their Company Page
• 73% of top brands are utilizing Sponsored Updates
• All of these top brands post an average of 12.6 updates per week

Although you don’t need to have your content machine in place on day one, these are great practices that should be emulated.

Sales – It is a very good idea that each of your sales staff has their own LinkedIn profile. Companies like to do business with people that they know.  Having a professional photograph and information about each sales person will help your company’s professionalism online and help them by having an “online business card”.  By the way, having a LinkedIn profile URL on your salespeople’s business cards is another way for your customers to learn more about them and you.

Sales should use LinkedIn to find key contact names of targeted prospects.  A word of caution –  many salespeople say they want to network and connect with professionals, when all they really want to do is turn that networking opportunity into a sales pitch.  Presenting your products and services to targeted prospects subtly is one thing, but don’t use LinkedIn as a tool to hound them for sales.  The better approach might be to see who you know on LinkedIn who might be able to introduce you to that contact.  Referrals are much more effective than cold calling on LinkedIn.  LinkedIn offers advertising opportunities to present your company’s products and services which is respectable way to get noticed.

Marketing – As mentioned above, there are some successful companies using LinkedIn very effectively.  Your marketing team should research these LinkedIn companies for best practices.  There is much to be learned about effective methods of leveraging LinkedIn and other social media networks.  The more updates that you can post on LinkedIn, the better.  Keeping your updates flowing, keeps your customers and prospects interested and updated on what is going on with your company.  I also recommend that your marketing team sign up for different LinkedIn Pulse channels.  There are millions of marketing professionals on LinkedIn and these groups love to share ideas that have worked for them.

Human Resources – Job seekers use LinkedIn as an online resume with the added value of providing recommendations from colleagues, skills, endorsements, volunteer information, blog posts, videos, photos, slide presentations, and documents. Your HR department should comb LinkedIn to find new talent.

Administration, IT and Production Staff – Having your administration, IT and production staff on LinkedIn can help build the company profile to your prospects and customers.  Not only is it important to have them create their own profiles, but also having them provide content for your corporate LinkedIn pages and sharing that information with their contacts spreads the word exponentially on social media.

Executive Team – The average number of connections that CEOs have on LinkedIn is 930.  Executives need to leverage LinkedIn for peer and new business relationships, partnerships and strategic alliances.

If you don’t have a corporate LinkedIn profile, build one.  Encourage your staff to create their own LinkedIn profiles and whenever you have a company update, make sure that you get your staff to share that information with their connections.  Leverage the power of LinkedIn to give your company more visibility and to expand your brand through networking.

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

Photo credit: A Name Like Shields Can Make You Defensive via Foter.com / CC BY

Statistics: LinkedIn and DMR

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.