Break out your Hawaiian shirts and comically oversized novelty sunglasses – January 28th is National Fun at Work Day! It’s a day dedicated to bringing some sunshine into a place where you spend most of your time, burning the midnight oil – and it’s only right that you should get to liven up the joint.
Yet it’s important to ensure that your organization is celebrating in ways that are beneficial overall. It’s hard to quantify “fun” when it comes to work environments – humor and entertainment is subjective. Yet there is one way to celebrate this holiday, and it’s one of most effective ways to do so: incorporating team building activities into your office’s celebration.
National Fun at Work Day Arrives Just in Time
First, let’s be honest – by the time the end of January rolls around, your organization’s workers are in desperate need of a break. The height of winter is one of the worst times of year for productivity. Cold, iron-gray skies, wet and soggy weather, and a lack of natural sunlight all combine to make the winter months some of the worst for morale. In fact, recent research has found that 56% of workers in North America find winter to have negative impacts on their mood – and workers who aren’t feeling their best simply aren’t as productive.
This makes the arrival of National Fun at Work Day perfect. Workers are often metaphorically crawling the walls of their offices by late January, and breaking up the monotony by incorporating even just a single day filled with good-natured activities while at work can be a lifesaver. Breaking up the monotony of months of dreariness provides a much-needed breath of fresh air to an otherwise gloomy office; that’s why you should schedule team building activities for your company to coincide with this day.
Why Combine Team Building?
The benefits of team building exercises are universally known. Learning skills like effective communication provide boosts to productivity, as does forging interpersonal bonds between team members. Workers that exhibit good teamwork skills – and that have those skills reinforced regularly – generally feel more fulfilled and better motivated, and inculcating these feelings in workers contributes to positive morale.
Reinforcing the benefits of teamwork should be a regular occurrence, with such team building activities being scheduled for several times a year. It’s preferable to have your company’s regular team building activities coincide with National Fun at Work Day because doing so makes these activities even more memorable. Ensuring that team building exercises are associated with “fun at work” helps reinforce the positive benefits of teamwork to employees and adds an additional facet to the day that goes beyond more superficial methods of celebrating the unofficial calendar holiday.
Having Fun is Serious Business
There are benefits to working in a lighthearted environment. Just as workers that have developed their teamwork skills are happier and more productive, so are workers that enjoy the environment they’re in. The two concepts dovetail together and reinforce one another, and this means they both need to be taken seriously by organizations that want the best not just from their workers but for their workers as well.
Do you need help preparing your organization for National Fun at Work Day? Are you anxious to ensure you have the most memorable and effective morale-boosting team building exercises scheduled for your workers? Rely on the team building experts. Contact us to see how we can help your organization turn Having Fun at Work Day into a truly positive – and productive – experience.