Work happy

Inside the Cubicle has a recent post on "the little things - the traditions, the quirks, the silly events - that make a big difference" at work. It got me thinking of all the little fun-at-work things that made a difference at the places I worked - and the ones that fell flat on their face.  In my experience, the good ones included:

• Friday Party: I worked at two companies (both founded by the same guy) that had a regular junk food-wine-beer party every Friday. I'll definitely date myself here by noting that at one time, Friday Party also meant grass. (All very Cambridge.) It was a great way to wind down the week and socialize, pretty much everybody went, and there were always leftovers for the weekend warriors. (Ah, the good old days when you had to drag into work on the weekend if you wanted to use a computer.) When the first of my Friday Party places, Dynamics Associates, closed its doors - having been acquired, our little outpost was eventually shut down and consolidated with the mothership out in the suburbs - about 200 people showed up for the final Friday Party. This at a company that I don't think ever had more than 50 or 60 people working there. At the final FP, one of my friends said, "You will never work at a place that inspires this kind of camaraderie again." But I did.
• Friday Lunch: Softbridge had Friday Party, but we also instituted Friday Lunch, for which people took turns bringing in desert. There was a small official element to Friday Lunch - news, announcements, recognition - but mostly it was about getting together and having fun. When we hired new people, we tried to get them to come to a Friday Lunch before they accepted an offer. If they could recoiled from the sometimes raucous, always irreverent Friday Lunch, they wouldn't have liked working at Softbridge very much.
• Color of the Week: I pretty much hated my two years, seven months, and twenty-three days I worked at Wang Labs, but I really enjoyed my group (a couple of dozen folks who formed the financial services vertical products group). Somewhere along the line, we started declaring "color of the week" and on Fridays, everyone - and I mean pretty much everyone - wore something with that color in it. The results were sometime hilarious. We had one techie who always managed to dredge up a shirt from the 60's or 70's that was the right color. We also got together for Friday lunch and played trivia, with people taking turns coming up with the game. (This week's winner brought next week's game.) The topics were pretty wide-ranging: Wang products, marine biology, TV theme songs, license plates, space exploration. Competition was intense, and we had an awful lot of fun playing - and also learned a lot about each other.   

And there were those things that didn't work:

• Bah Humbug Christmas Eve Lunch: The first two years I worked at Wang, they had a very nice tradition of having families come into work on Christmas Eve morning. Each group or area had parties and the company closed around noon. All very sweet and fun to see all the little kids running around. My final year, the new management put an end to this sweet little tradition, sent around a mean spirited memo reminding everyone that it was a full workday, then invited us all to a free lunch - served up by the execs wearing Santa hats - in the company caf. By the time my group got to the front of the line, the first tier execs had left and we got served rubber turkey and luke warm potatoes by a bunch of lower level VPs we didn't recognize. Lame and dispiriting.
• The Good Humor Man: When I worked at Genuity, senior managers would - once a quarter or so - wheel around the building with an ice cream cart, going from floor to floor giving out treats. Sure, it was nice to have the ice cream break, but I was never quite sure what these were supposed to accomplish, since it's not as if the execs ever hung around to chat. They just wheeled on over to the next area and rang their little bell.
• Hail to the Chief: The all time worse was when I worked one Christmas vacation as a temp at a large insurance agency in Worcester. The pink collar workers sat at desks in an open floor, broken up into sub-areas by file cabinets. I'm not sure what our group was called, but I spent my days there typing the letter "B" on forms. On Christmas Eve, mid-morning, our boss told us that the president of the company would be coming by to extend his Christmas greetings to us. She was quite excited, and coached us on how we should behave. A few seconds before Mr. Big arrived at our area, his frontrunner appeared at the opening to our enclosure and announced, "He's on his way."
  
  "Sit up straight, girls," our boss barked, "Face the entryway."
  
  Mr. Big showed up, stood at the entrance for a second or two, waved, and, without making eye contact with anyone, hollered, "Merry Christmas, girls."
  
  After he'd left our boss sighed and said, in a hero-worshipful tone, "He doesn't have to do that." 

The ones that worked were organic and pretty much defined the culture. Even if they were "invented" by management, they never seemed obligatory or imposed. It's probably no accident that the corporate fun that was the most fun was in smaller settings where everyone knew each other - and management knew everybody - and were generally pretty friendly. At Wang (big company) the small group "color of the week" was good for morale, bonded our team, and gave us all a good laugh. The corporate, grudging Christmas lunch was just depressing.

Interesting to consider if you're thinking about what makes a corporate culture positive.