It’s the time of year when it is warm outside, you’re wearing flip flops and barbecuing on the weekends. There is an excitement in the air that comes with more hours of sunshine. Why not bring some of that summertime fun and energy into your office?
For July and August, we’re having Friday Fundays at the Academy! We picked the theme of focusing on fitness in some way each week. A fun perk is that we can wear our favorite workout gear to the office (as long as we don’t have visitors scheduled). We left it intentionally vague and challenged each department to come up with a Friday Funday activity. We wanted everyone on our team to be involved with the planning. We’ve found that we have more engagement if we’re able to have small groups or different individuals in charge of coming up with the ideas from week to week as it creates ownership of the activities’ success.
Where do you start? It’s easy, set up a way for people to sign up, be that a sheet hanging on a bulletin board in a break room or a Google Doc that allows for everyone to edit the file. Then, ask everyone to sign up for ownership of a week’s theme. You may have to send a friendly reminder to the office manager or department heads to encourage their teams to sign up. Then, each team or person is in charge of communicating the Friday Funday activity to everyone else. We share this type of information in a designated Slack channel so everyone is in the loop. Since we have a good number of our employees in various locations, we look for ways that we can all participate with posting our results or having activities at a designated time that works best for the majority of the team.
This is a great creative outlet for your teammates to come up with new ideas and also be a part of the larger team. To get your creative juices flowing, we’ve had a selfie competition where the person who posted the most workout selfies in a week on our Slack channel won a prize. Our Member Services Team had a great idea to encourage positive mindset by challenging the team to not complain all week. The penalty for complaining was a specific form of exercise depending on the day of the week. Let me just say, doing 10 burpees in the middle of the office at 9am caused me to think about what I said on Thursday! Next week we’re having a hula hoop competition for those onsite and offsite to participate in. As you can see, the possibilities are endless and the ideas can turn into something that are not just for Fridays, but for an entire week.
If you’re doing something similar, share in the comments below!
Erin Mathew
Associate Director, Projects and Event Planning
American Academy of Estate Planning Attorneys, Inc.
9444 Balboa Avenue, Suite 300
San Diego, California 92123
Phone: (858) 453-2128
www.aaepa.com
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