Comments on: Make your company more fun: Start “back channel” conversations

By: Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 06:13:52 +0000

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.

By: Kamal

Kamal — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:58:24 +0000

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.

By: Chris Peters

Chris Peters — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:19:59 +0000

No problem. This revived the idea for me, which I’ll try out at my current workplace. So thank you as well!

By: Josh Tynjala

Josh Tynjala — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:50:10 +0000

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!

By: Chris Peters

Chris Peters — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:12:30 +0000

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.