Healthy Employees = Healthy Profits
Creating simple team sporting events boosts morale, brings people together, and creates better-performing companies. All of this can start with you. Today.
Workload piling up? Team morale not the best? Want to actually use health & wellness more than reading the company website? “Move forward” with your idea: Organize a company-wide light-touch sporting event.
Step One: Pick The Right Sport
The sweet spot is an event that is all-inclusive, requires some degree of focus and participation, and has enough competitive juices to keep your colleagues challenged and interested. If you can find something to stretch over a few weeks, you also increase chances of participation and allow enthusiasm to the grow. For this article, let’s say you are going to organize, lead and deliver a company-wide table tennis tournament.
Step Two: Simple Format. Don’t Compete With The Day Job
It’s very important to keep the plan to one-page and make sure you aren’t distracting folks from their day jobs. So, in this example, you decide to have a tournament where in the first stage folks self-organize during lunch or breaks and play each other and record their scores. This allows coworkers to break through any shyness of playing in a competition, but also in a way where you can start to quantify the results. By spreading the event over a few weeks, you keep the event organization manageable and you can adjust or pivot based on feedback. You’d be surprised once people see their name and some scores & rankings how it sparks the competitive spirit.
Step Three: Tell the Story
Use an approved internal company communication platform to highlight how folks are doing to increase a sense of participation, community, and excitement. Remember, you can reward different narratives, not just who is the best player. Have the “inspirational player of the week” or the “best point of the day”. This still honors the Serenas and Rogers of your company table tennis world, while leveraging the deeper workplace community that celebrates the many stories of your colleagues.
Step Four: Finish Strong
In this example, you’ve spent a few weeks with light-touch table tennis matches. Lots of folks have played. You’ve published scores and had fun rankings and you’ve shared concurrent human-interest stories. Time to finish strong with a series of final competitive matches to determine winners in whatever brackets you set up. Companies are about profits and achievement and there is nothing wrong with crowning champions after authentically giving everyone their moments to shine.
Step Five: Thank Everyone. Summarize the Journey
There’s a reason why sporting events, or awards ceremonies have specific closure activities. Folks like it when the movie ends with a sense of completion. Take a moment, thank everyone by name, share the stats, share the stories, congratulate the champions and tie the event to the mission statement and culture of the company. The win-win final steps will inspire others in the office and give the company a clear view of what the event achieved. It’s about the “we” not the “me”.
In even the most "budget-conscious" environment, this entire event costs as low as the price of a ping pong table, some equipment, and trophies. Not a bad investment for an energized workforce focused better on company delivery.
###
Justin Lacche is a baseball executive in the San Francisco Giants organization.