CareerCurve™

I have a family member who recently received an invite by his employer to a corporate function on a Saturday night. He is excited to attend and that got me thinking about how many times these things backfire. When my current company plans activities, I also look forward to them and do not feel that it will affect my career if I am unable to attend. But this was not always the case.

In my previous life, I worked for various organizations that planned golf trips (I LOVE golf but trust me, many of my co-workers didn’t), “fun” days involving obstacle courses and relay races (ugh – should’ve called them “Unfun” days), and Whirly-Ball and Paintball outings that we had to pay for ourselves. Each of these, although usually on Saturdays and not necessarily free, certainly felt mandatory. To summarize, my take on corporate social functions was this: If you’re going to make me spend my day off with people from work I would love to define what I consider to be fun. Why should I have to participate and pay for something I have no interest in doing? And I was not the minority.

Was HR aware of this? Did they care? It felt like they probably knew that this is what we thought but that their job was to plan these things, not worry about whether anyone actually got anything out of it.

For HR, two of the challenges with planning corporate events have to be what to do and how to get people to do it. What to do should be relatively simple to decide if you communicate with your employees. Put together well-constructed surveys and vary the types of activities based on the feedback you receive. But how do you avoid the “it’s not mandatory but if you don’t show your face its career suicide” impression?

Is this a product of the culture? I wrote last week about transparency. Transparency breeds trust. Could it really be as simple as that? If you have that trust and you extend an invite that is just that – an invite that employees can respond to in any way they choose – does the feeling that they better at least make an appearance go away because they trust that you say what you mean and mean what you say? If you say it isn’t mandatory, the employees trust that it isn’t?

Is it the delivery? Does it make a difference if the invitation feels like an invitation and not a corporate mandate? Have you ever considered the wording and how it impacts the perception?

Do you know what your employees really think about the social functions your company plans? Are they considered mandatory even though you say they’re not? Is this perception by the employees related to your culture? Do you, in fact, want them to feel they are mandatory? Why? Please share any feedback in the comments.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion about how to keep employees interested, engaged, and excited at work.  When I was first out of college, I worked for an organization that will remain nameless in the customer service department.  I hated this job.  Let me be clear.  I HATED this job.   However, one thing that was very interesting about this job was the mindset I had, even outside of work hours, considering that I was miserable.

This particular company had a program in place that rewarded ideas.  There were different tiers and monetary rewards based on these tiers.  Basically, anyone in the organization could submit an idea on how to do things more effectively, more inexpensively,  an idea that would create a better experience for our customers or improve communication between departments internally.   It could be anything.  If you submitted your idea and it was an original idea, you got a small bonus.  If you submitted an original idea and it was implemented, that was where the big bucks were. 

This was the neatest program for many reasons.  How often do you hear your employees wonder aloud, “Why don’t we do it like this?  Our process doesn’t make any sense!”  A program like this provides a platform for people to offer solutions instead of just complaining.   I watched  ideas from the people sitting around me get implemented along with a company wide announcement of how much money this idea saved the organization.  Each submission was reviewed by a committee and a personal reply was crafted that explained if the idea was being considered and why or why not.  As a result we learned a lot more about the operations of the company as a whole.  This education, in turn, created better and better ideas.   It became a challenge to come up with a solution rather than just complain.   Obviously, a little extra money as an incentive didn’t hurt either.  There was also a value in feeling like you had the ability to truly contribute to growing a company.

I have not heard of any company since that has a program like this and I wonder why not?  Why wouldn’t you want to have hundreds of people constantly thinking of ways to improve the company?  And we did think that way.  All the time.

There were days where I would literally hope I would get in a fender bender so I wouldn’t have to go to work, but at the same time I’m at a red light wishing this, I’m thinking about ways to improve the company.  It became a permanent mindset and I think it helped me do a better job.   All these years later, I’m kind of blown away by how much I hated going to work, but how my wheels were constantly spinning regardless of that fact.