business builder human resources
How to picnic in a snowstorm,
and other delightful ideas
by Mick and Sandy Lee Last March, one of our vendors dropped by the office and found us having a picnic. She was clearly taken aback.
All of our staff members, dressed in Bermuda shorts and T-shirts, were sitting on blankets and beach towels, munching goodies from picnic baskets and getting ready to dive into a six-foot-long hoagie. The room was decorated with sunbursts and other items suggesting the long-awaited arrival of summer as driving snow swirled against the windows.
We invited her to join us and within minutes, she too was experiencing what we at our company call “delight.”
Since starting the company in the early 1970s, we’ve always recognized the importance of having fun at work, but the term “delight” wasn’t part of our mission statement until we happened on the book, Enterprise One-to-One: Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age, by Don Peppers
and Martha Rogers. (It’s recommended reading, as is Raving Fans, by Ken Blanchard.) We finally had a face to put on what we consistently strive to achieve in our daily work: delighting our clients, ourselves and others who come in contact with us.
Relocation is the third greatest stress producer after death and divorce, so for us to be productive and enthusiastic, we need to be happy and creative and truly enjoy what we do. One of the best ways to get there is to ease a bit and laugh as often as you can. Permitting people to have fun, regardless of their job, allows people to be who they are and empowers them to be their best.
The fun quotient begins with us, the owners. Mick is the one “who extols the virtues of goofing off,” says one of the company’s vendors. He has the standard business tools in his office, but visitors may only notice the giant walleye hanging from the ceiling. He has the standard CEO reference books, but also some Red Stangeland Norwegian joke anthologies.
Someone might be talking to him about some business issue when he’ll break into a Norwegian accent to make a point or just for fun. A bumper sticker trumpets, “Legalize Lutefisk.”
At least one company client likes the toys in Mick’s office. “When Mick first fired that space launcher at me that shoots Nerf disks, I was stunned, then I burst into laughter, grabbed it from him, and fired off a few rounds of my own,” the client says.
Employers can spread the delight beyond the founder’s office. Each quarter, we assign a budget and designate a “delight team” made up of several of our staff. Their responsibility is to come up with little events and entertainments to help cope with our stressful jobs, to support one another, to foster an atmosphere of a good family and, most of all, to have a little break from the ordinary. We hang a calendar of upcoming delights to remind us what’s ahead.
We disburse delight in our training and communications materials, including a relocation packet we call Kit ’n Caboodle for transferees and their families.
We work to extend this idea to customers, too. For example, when one of our staff asked a transferee at the end of the move if there were anything else that he could do, the transferee responded by joking, “Well, you could send me an ice cream sundae.” So we sent an e-mail sundae to him.
We retain a wellness coach to meet with our staff on a quarterly basis. We also encourage our employees to participate in charities that are meaningful to them.
None of this works without buy-in from each of us. Realizing that, and for a lot of other reasons, we became an open-book company in the early 1990s. We open our books to our entire staff and encourage each employee to participate in company planning. We have profit-sharing. We rewrote our mission statement to include the idea of delight.
The efforts at delight, whether large or small, directly improve our business results. So next time you find your chin on your chest, smile and have a picnic.
