EVENTFUL HEADACHE

Organising office events is fun. Yet it can also be the most headachy of all headaches. This is because, despite having formed a gung-ho committee in the beginning of things, you will ultimately be running the whole entire show by yourself in the end.

There are only two outcomes of an office event. Either a flying success earning you heaps of praise and the appledom of your boss's eye, or a total fiasco that, in some cases I know, can lead you to being sacked.

So organising events is risky business indeed.

Is is very common for companies to assign event management to the HR people. Of course when you sign up for the job your employment contract and/or JD never stated this. But remember that clause at the end of your contract and/or JD which states "any other tasks assigned by the Management" or something else to the same effect? Well, taking this risk is one of them. That is fine in itself, but then you may ask, why HR? or if there is a committee, why does HR need to spearhead it? Well, don't you know? Because other people are TOO BUSY. Only you, the HR practitioner, has so much free time because your functions are not as important as accounts or operations or all others for that matter. The fact that you are assigned the partying affairs have nothing to do with your talent in the field. It's merely because you are the expert in being the clown.

Hahaha.

I am just being sarcastic to some quarters who insist on trivialising my work. The fact is, I am proud to be an event organiser, am honoured to be assigned the task, and me and my team will do our very best to rock it like it's never been rocked before.

But the headache will still happen of course. But if everyone is working on the project as a team, it will fly.

So the biggest, and last event of the year, for us shall be the Annual Dinner (or in our case, the Half-Decade Dinner as the last Annual Dinner was held about 5 years ago). My HR team is prepared for a big headache. But we already have Plan B. If we have to this ourselves in the end, we are going to make a humongous deal out of it. We will stamp our mark everywhere including on all the mites in the hotel ballroom carpet with the words "THE FUN YOU ARE HAVING TONIGHT AND OF WHICH MEMORIES YOU WILL NEVER FORGET IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE BLOOD, TOIL AND SWEAT OF THE SUPERMEN AND WOMEN OF HR DEPT".

We look forward to being the HR Dream Team this side of the country has ever seen: we will fly AND rock.

FUN@WORK: EMPLOYEE RELATIONS 21 AUGUST 2009

Photo copyright Tahirah Manesah Abu Bakar, August 2009.

In my company, we organise monthly staff lunch parties, on a Friday lunchtime. HR Dept hosts the parties and makes the arrangements and everyone else chips in the cost of food. In the beginning the parties were hosted to celebrate staff birthdays. Eventually they evolved to becoming an employee relations event, where the office staff have junk food together as friends and forget all about work for 1.5 hours. In the latest edition, it became a noisy shindig, but nevertheless served the purpose well.

It all started with a little box with a little slot. Inside this box were 20 little rolled-up strips of paper with various actions printed on it, and everyone was to form a circle and pass this box around while the music played. When the music stopped, the person holding the box was to shake a little roll-up strip of paper out of the slot, and do what it said on the paper.

Now, every stressed-out workaholic needs a little hair let-down. And what better way to do it than on a Friday. So for a good 20 minutes everyone went back in time to becoming kids again, passing the little "poison box" around like we used to do at birthday parties when we were little. No one realised how much fun it was until we started tossing the box around. It was hilarious to see everyone getting "poisoned". The "poison" in the little paper rolls were really silly like "dance like a chicken" and "balance a pencil on your head and walk ten steps" and "hop on one leg while singing" and mid-way through the game some people even went and hid in the toilet until the game was over! We took the chance to take the mickey out of some "selected" colleagues by purposely making the music stop when the box came to them. The HR Dept turned into a daytime pub as everyone ate and drank and shrieked and clapped and hooted.

I don't think anyone cared about the time then as no one asked ;-)

After it was all over we uploaded the photos on Facebook and on the shared drive. It was apparent that we've become more than just an office. We've become a community.

Photos can be viewed here.