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.
