In celebration of the Final Four days of March and Q1 – and the final four teams in the tournament, our Quote of the Week is on Distance & Laughter.
Talk about a way to boost morale and productivity. And engagement. And performance. A quadruple win!
Here are 10 ways to stir up some laughter at your office this week.
1.Have a Final Four Party. Have a Final Two Party. Have a Final One Party.
2. Have a Biggest-Loser-So-Far Contest. In addition to declaring a winner for your bracket pool, how about declaring the biggest loser too? Want to give a prize? How about a ZERO candy bar?
3. Serve cookies. Milk too if you can. Just pass them around at a staff meeting. It brings out the kid (and giggles) in all of us.
4. Share a joke at the start of each staff meeting. You don’t have to be in charge each time. Assign it to a different person for each meeting. In case you need a few to get started, here are some knock knock jokes we collected during National Knock Knock Joke Week – perfect especially for people in sales.
5. Share a brainteaser to start, revive or end each staff meeting. Here is the Business Class collection.
6. Try some Spur-of-the-Moment Nonsense.
7. Play a game. Need to teach something? Or reinforce learning? Play Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune or Trivial Pursuit. Better yet. Dress up like a game show host.
8. Get a blow up doll. You don’t even have to be present to stir up laughs. Whenever Tracey Goetz, Broker-in- Charge at the Durham, NC branch of PrudentialYork Simpson Underwood, goes out of town, she leaves Dolly in charge. Dolly,a big blow up doll, actually sits at Tracey’s desk.
9. Have a relay race. Watch this Nonsense from Zappos.
10. Pull an April Fools Joke. Just be wise about it. There are some good(and bad) prank ideas for the office at: Discoverfun.com and The Fools Day.com. Repeat! Be wise about pulling pranks. Discoverfun.com says,
“The important thing to remember with pranking at work is that you should always look at the worst case scenario of the prank you are attempting. If you or anybody else loses their job – it won’t be so funny.”
Another wise piece of advice:
“Never pull an April Fools Prank that you couldn’t handle if it was played on you.”
**Note: 10 by 10 on Tuesday (also known as a Quick List) is a weekly feature is for managers who don’t have time or don’t want to make time to read lengthy articles or even short paragraphs. Here you will find 10 tips or questions or steps or ways to Get 2 Goal or Be a Better Manager, etc). And it will be posted by 10 (AM – EST) on Tuesdays. Here’s our collection of Quick Lists to date.
