Today I want to embark on a two part series concerning company workers and the work environment.

 

The chances are if you’re over the age of 18 you’ve probably held down some sort of job or other in your life. When you were working there were you happy, or were you unhappy with the work environment. Ask yourself what makes a great work environment?

 

In todays post I want to discuss employee activities and community, and in tomorrows post look at the work environment and the separate aspects of that specific factor.

 

Employee Activities and The Community

 

Happy employees work better. This simple fact can be the basics of shaping a work place into an effective productivity machine. If you have happy staff, you have people that like working, and as a result get more work done.

 

One way you can achieve a happy staff base is employee activities. By this, I mean co-ordinated activities that are made to enforce camaraderie, community relations and teamwork within your companies worker base.

 

These activities can be fun or work oriented. It is up to you as a company to decide which method to employ.

 

A more work oriented activity would be a team building or communication program through development days or worker training. These would be company sanctioned events where employees are forced to participate in company regulated activities.

 

The creative activities I love, are the ones that go outside the norm of development days, and allow the employees to have genuine fun in their own way while still building a community and team work.

 

The Community

 

I want to take a quick break from talking about Activities to talk about the community. I keep mentioning it, but what is it, and what benefit does it bring to the work place?

 

A strong community helps workers work more efficiently. If you have friendships in the workplace, and a strong community workers are more apt to help out others, and even increase each others productivity.

 

Would you as a worker rather work among colleagues, or among friends? I would hedge my bets that most would rather work with friends and it’s exactly this point that a strong community achieves.

 

The strong community is build through employee communications and activities. Even if it just a meet and greet, or social hour weekly. By improving employee communications, it makes it easier for employees to work more efficiently in project teams or, other group activities that can be crucial to your company.

 

Back to Employee Activities

 

I want to use the case study of MarketLeverage, one of my favorite CPA companies (review here), to demonstrate how a simple sport can be used as an employee activity that can build a great community and let the employees have a lot of fun at the same time.

 

MarketLeverage plays in a men only baseball league. I personally think this is a brilliant idea by the management to institute this into the company. Obviously since they have a team, it has been taken up and is effective.

 

What this does for the company is it allows the employees to have some fun playing sports, while building the skills of teamwork and communication in a more casual environment.

 

In sports you are always communicating with your team mates. Since we are talking about baseball, you are constantly throwing to others and all working together towards a common goal of winning.

 

What this does for the average employee is it lets them build a rapport with the other employees and also acclimatizes them to working together towards a common goal.

 

What this does for the company is improve employee communication in the office, and will help for projects as I stated before.

 

Although in this case study it is a mens only baseball league, the women aren’t excluded from this team building. They come along and cheer for their peers. Overall this activity is a great way to improve employee relations, and also, for any one seeing the pictures, catches, the phrase, “your affiliate manager in action”

 

To wrap this up, here are some action clips from some MarketLeverage Baseball team, can you spot your affiliate manager?

 

Erick Bright (my aff manager)

Kyle McCall

Mike Kelly

Jen Fluker

 

Part 2 coming soon