Put up a whiteboard in your company’s office. Not a whiteboard for meetings, mind you. A whiteboard with a question. Then, drop a bunch of markers next to it and wait for answers. It doesn’t matter what you ask, but try to make it a question that requires more than a “yes” or “no” answer. It could be something fun, or maybe a wild idea that you want validated. Without a doubt, passersby will stop for a moment and start writing. Don’t get it? Here’s an example of a question to ask:
What do we need?
It’s a very straightforward question, but you might be surprised about the answers. You’ll get serious answers about things that slow people down and make it hard for them to do their job. You’ll get inspiring answers about features your products or services may benefit from in the future (maybe even things people might be too scared to suggest in real meetings). You’ll get funny answers about how someone wants “weapons-grade plutonium”. In all cases, you’ll get useful results and engage the people around you. You’ll probably get more than answers, though. The most fascinating phenomenon is that people will start having conversations. Bob will read another Alice’s answer, then comment on it with his own thoughts with a little arrow pointing to the original.
I’ve seen the happen at two companies at which I’ve worked. At one, I was a full-time employee, and at the other, I was a contractor. In both cases, the message board instantly caught on, without explanation. One day it appears, and people instantly get it. In one case, it wasn’t a whiteboard. Nothing was provided for writing an answer. It was just a big thing on the wall with a permanent question (I don’t remember what exactly, but basically, “what are you up to?”). By day two, a clever individual had figured it out, and his or her answer materialized on a post-it. A conversation thread on the board became a cascading line of yellow squares. A couple weeks in, pictures of team members doing fun stuff were taped up there, and it was a great success.
Many business focus engagement so strongly on customers, that a little extra effort to engage employees can be surprising and exciting. A whiteboard or something else that asks a simple question brings a light-hearted atmosphere to the office and it may give you some information about what’s happening behind the scenes that was otherwise hidden. As someone who has experienced this addition to an office environment twice in my career, I highly recommend it for every business.
A little less serious, but I’ve had quite a bit of success with another couple approaches.
In line with your example, we had a white board where we made up fictitious drink names. Some of them weren’t work-appropriate, but who cares.
And another example that we did a couple times was draw a background like a stage or a road and had people draw stuff onto the board. The scenes got pretty funny/funky rather quickly.
And there was always the fun game where you draw something and then have people cross it off and draw something that “beats” that. It’s funny to see what gets associated. Bomb < Hippies < Soap < etc.
Again, not as serious as your example, but still great for team building.
Chris, I guess I did kind of focus on the serious aspects. However, the reason I posted this in the first place is because I enjoyed the fun aspects so much. I’m the guy who writes “weapons-grade plutonium” and “all we need is love”. Everybody contributing to drawings sounds like a lot of fun. Thanks for sharing!
No problem. This revived the idea for me, which I’ll try out at my current workplace. So thank you as well!
This is something I have never experienced; we use the white board only when we need to find a solution to a question or while doing a high-level design to a project.
Does the team get involved in this very-well? I feel like this will work for about a month or two? Once we were having a funny internal blog where all members were contributing to the stories/news; but lasted only for about a month.
Definitely I will be trying this, may be we can start with the funny way like drawings and move on to questions along the way.
Kamal, I think a whiteboard could be more successful than an internal blog because everyone probably walks past a centrally-located whiteboard daily. With some new content from time to time, you’ll catch a person’s eye as they’re on their way from their desk to somewhere else in the office. With a blog, everyone has to remember to go out of their way to visit it (or set it as their homepage, but most people probably don’t want to do that), so it can be more easily forgotten.