Spooks, Séances and Staff Socialising

31 Oct 2014

Encouraging staff to get involved can be hard, email campaigns, events and eMarketing is great for enticing in new leads for your business and updating existing customers, but what do you do when you want to get people involved internally to help lift team spirit? With the festive season approaching fast in the UK, it is prime time to dust the cobwebs off the office disco ball, scrub up on those iconic dance moves, and, most of all, get staff banter lifted ready for staff party socialising.

Our office is alive (or dead ha ha!?!) today. The techies are trick or treating, the project managers are pumpkin carving, and the sales team are conducting séances.

Well maybe not quite séances but we are all busy having a happy Halloween! The buzz amongst the team is rife, thanks to our enthusiastic sales team who have managed to persuade a good percentage of the OpenCRM office to come in today in fancy dress. We have a fox, a witch (standard), the Universe – yes, the Universe – and at least one C S Lewis character. They have also brought in treats for lunch. The idea is that people can contribute an amount of spare change to our chosen charity Papyrus and enjoy the pleasure of a free lunch and a dress down day.

Now of course it would be too much if we had this much fun every day, but it is good to do things like this to keep up the moral in a busy and often quiet office.

Here are a few pointers to help encourage your staff to get involved a bit more this festive season:

1. Communication is key. Here at OpenCRM we have various ways of communicating, but for internal fun stuff, we use an internal social media platform to communicate/chat about ideas. This is great as it means colleagues can discuss plans and any potential concerns about a staff social, easily, without clogging up each other’s mailboxes and spamming management (for example!).

2. Charitable incentive is also a win-win situation. A lot of people when busy can find staff socials a bit ‘faffy’ and perhaps think they are a waste of time. If you involve a charity in the process, it means you can both make a difference inside and outside of your organisation.

3. Enthusiasm. If you have a few strong willed staff members in your workforce who are happy to help enthuse the rest of the team, then the rest will follow. Try to pick someone to pioneer the staff social efforts, and make sure they get enough encouragement and support during the organisational processes.

So there you go, a few little happy hints to get your workforce involved before no time. Happy Halloween!