Surprise your team with these 5 fun morning activities!
Everyone hates mornings. It’s a universal fact as strong and unflinching as evolution! You hate mornings. And so does your team!
Irrespective of whether you’re working at a corporate or a startup, employees face a zillion problems on a daily basis, and yet the most cumbersome of them is starting the day without the morning blues! As an employer, your biggest challenge is to make your team want to be at office in the morning, and to ensure they don’t suffer with monotony or work burnout. No matter how fabulous, inviting, and inspiring your office space is, every morning you see your employees absent-mindedly scrolling through their facebook feeds, taking unnecessarily long smoke breaks, organizing and re-organizing their work-desks – and you know there’s nothing one can do about it! Unless you try.
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A good start to a day is very crucial, and more often than not, the mirror for the rest of your day. If you begin your day with a happy frame of mind, you are more likely productive day, and vice versa. Employers would love, more than anything, to have their team at their productive best at all times. So we came up with 5 fun and funky ideas, that’ll help your team start their day with smiling faces, and we assure you, none of these will take more than 15 minutes off anyone’s clock!
Surprise their work-stations
This is something you can do in personal capacity without involving the rest of the team. Everyone loves compliments! Every once in a while, try coming in early to leave a personal note, complimenting the work done by a certain employee. Make it special by adding a pretty little flower or a funny caricature on their pin-up boards. While doing this daily for everyone is unreasonable (and somewhat kills the point), you can do this on a rotational basis, wherein a randomly chosen employee gets a personal note every day. This keeps everyone excited to see if it’s their turn today, and the excited chatter and discussion will lift the overall team enthusiasm every morning!
Dance!
A little cliché, but it always works. Look at how the Bigg Boss house uses music to wake up the sleepy housemates every morning. You can watch them waking up reluctantly, but the next thing you know, they all break into a groove. They are ready to face the day like a fireball, and this happens every single day! Another example, and a more relevant one, is this video that went viral a few months ago, where the Accenture Mumbai staff claimed that they dance for five minutes every morning before they get to work.
Morning news bulletin
Imagine reaching work after being elbowed by 20 different women because you chose to get off at Andheri from a Virar Local. You think it’s the worst that can happen to anyone, and reach office in the worst mood ever. Breaking news: misery does like company, and hearing similar horror stories of your co-workers’ morning blues’ could actually lighten up your grumpy mood! Make this a daily activity where you urge employees to prove that they’ve got it worst today. Throw in a free head massage from their person of choice to invite participation!
Bakra of the day!
No one cares about that inspirational thought of the day, at least not early in the morning. So use your bulletin board to inspire some creativity in your team! Every morning, allow any employee to put up a funny picture, cheeky tweet, or awkward caricature of co-workers, up on the bulletin board. Keep the board open for comments and captions from everyone who enters the office after! See how the mood shifts instantly.
Team of pranksters
Taking inspiration from The Ellen DeGeneres Show, entrust a team of fun pranksters with the responsibility to prank someone new every morning. Whether it’s a fart bomb under their seat cushion, or scary wallpaper when they switch on their laptops – it’s a sure shot way to get people pumped up and charged, as long as it’s done tastefully!
These are just a few ideas, and we’re sure you can come up with more. Don’t hesitate to experiment. Such fun initiatives can also work as brilliant team building tools, and we all know how essential employee engagement is. Be creative and kick out the blues!