As personal New Year Resolutions fade here are three revolutionary ideas to improve life in the office:
Most of us make personal New Year Resolutions, so why not try thinking of some for the workplace too?
1. Less meetings, better conversations
Ban formal meetings on Mondays and Fridays, instead encourage lunches and informal chats over coffee at either end of the week. This idea is based on research by Oxford think tank Career Innovations who identified that by closing the Conversation Gap organisations could build trust, increase employee engagement and retain talent more effectively.
2. Sit somewhere different
Most offices arrange seating in functional groups, whilst this should mean that departments can work more closely it very often creates a series of ‘silos’. Instead, allow people to sit next to people from different functional areas, this way they will overhear what’s going on all around the business. Most of us have a pretty good idea of what’ happening in our team from the day to day work and interactions, where communication breaks down tends to be outside our own teams.
3. Play a game
Our schooling causes many of us to separate work from play. Most of us grew up in an environment in which there was class time and play time. The two needn’t be separate, in fact there are great advantages to incorporating play into our work. It stimulates creativity, builds relationships and engenders a sense of belonging and membership. There are, of course, no rules as to what constitutes a game. Chess and Twister are both games. In the workplace measuring performance, generating ideas or simply tackling a task as a team can create a ‘field of play’
Go ahead and break down some unnecessary boundaries in 2015, make work more fun and you may well see performance improve as a result.
