Fun and Mastery 2: Morale events that actually boost morale

Does your place of work have "morale events"? Are they successful at increasing morale? Would you like them to be?

Here are the steps of running a typical morale event:

1. Spend money
2. Feed and booze employees
3. Hope that it worked

Regular morale events of this sort rarely maintain their potency with employees over the long run. Regular exposure to such rituals tends to jade or entitle employees. Rather than throwing more effort into step 3 above, let's see if our recent lesson on fun can help.

Individually, we experience fun when we try low-stakes tests of our skills; can organizations do the same thing at a group level? Consider activities related to the practice of your organization and see if you can make available small challenges around that. Studying how kids play, these challenges should be:

• Qualitatively different from business-as-usual
• Experimental
• Voluntary
• Low-stakes
• A natural creative extension of the organization's ability

In one of my most memorable team meetings, the high-level dev manager running the show (Tom) said he was off to grab a guest speaker. A moment after he left the room, an attendee's (Dave's) phone rang. Tom told Dave to look under his laptop. The note under the laptop told us that Tom had gone to a secret location with a bunch of ice cream bars and we would have to decipher a series of clues involving tiny programming challenges and some crypto libraries in order to find him before the ice cream melted. The guest speaker, was, of course, a ruse. 

For the cost of some ice cream and a little bit of creativity, we got in some bonus programming practice, had some fun exercising their brains and working together, and deepened our pride for being on such a team. Neither jadedness nor entitlement accompanied this morale event. This experience is the target of every teambuilding exercise and every morale event. This is the mark which is so often missed.

If you're planning a morale event, you're still allowed and encouraged to spend money to feed and booze employees, but a small bonus challenge for your team can transform your check-box event into a fun and enduring milestone on your team's path to mastery.