Although summer is still some distance away yet, it’s not to early to start making plans.
Everybody loves summertime, and why not? Long days, combined with delightfully warm weather, it’s a recipe for fun. If, of course, you’re not cooped up in the office all day. Unfortunately, that’s exactly where most of us are.
Just because your employees have to miss out on some summertime fun though, that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to bring the fun to them. Here are a few ideas you can put in practice this year to make your company’s summer even brighter.
Field Trips!
This isn’t something every company will have the funds for but if you can manage it, it can really make a huge difference in employee morale.
It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or extravagant. If your city has a zoo, for instance, you can pick a day, or perhaps several, depending on how many employees you’ve got and to account for staffing considerations, and start taking teams out for an afternoon at the zoo.
If you want to make it a bit more work related, you can also build in various team building elements, or things that encourage creativity and outside the box thinking which will be useful once everyone gets back to the office.
Ice Cream Day
In most parts of the country, the summer months are downright hot and there’s no better cure for hot weather than a dish or cone filled with cold, delicious ice cream. Even better, setting up an impromptu ice cream bar in the break room is a pretty simple, low-cost proposition and it doesn’t require time away from the office to pull it off.
Open House Days
Over the course of the summer, you may want to try and squeeze a couple of these in. Food and fun for the whole family, but this goes beyond the simple backyard BBQ at work. This is a chance for the families of your employees to get a look behind the curtain. To come in and tour your facility so they can see what their loved one does and where they do it. Done correctly, this can create a fun, memorable day for everyone involved, as long as you know going in that there will be a certain amount of inevitable disruption that occurs, and plan accordingly.
Fun Contests And Competitions
Another idea revolves around having a variety of costume days, say one a month, during the summertime. Maybe one month it’s Tacky Hawaiian Shirt Day, and another month it’s Disco Fever, and so on. The more outlandish the better, with prizes awarded to the best and/or worst costumes on display. It’s a great way to have some lighthearted fun and hand out a few well-deserved prizes.
There are plenty of other ideas of course. The suggestions presented here merely scratch the surface, but should serve as food for thought, giving you seeds from which to grow your own fully-formed ideas. The bottom line is, it’s easy to inject a bit of fun into the office during the summer months, and it would be a welcome change indeed.