Did you see the opening ceremonies on Friday night? Wow! What an amazing way to start the 2012 Summer Olympics! My favorite part was the lighting of the Olympic torch. It was so cool to see David Beckham flying down the Thames River with the torch at the bow! And how about those fireworks? London certainly provides a beautiful backdrop for the Olympic games.

Over the weekend, the first gold medal of the games was awarded to Yi Siling of China in the women's 10-meter air rifle, and that was only the beginning of the excitement. There were many memorable moments, such as Kim Rhode winning her fifth consecutive gold medal and Ryan Lochte's gold medal finish in the men's 400 IM event. What has been your favorite Olympic moment so far? Tell me in the comments!

We are excited to announce the first of the Baudville Games winners, too! Taking home the gold in Rubber Band Archery is Great River Health Systems!

Will Great River Health Systems' momentum from the big win propel them into week two or will an underdog upset them? There’s only one way to find out!

Continue the excitement from this weekend’s kick off with the second event in our Baudville Games.  This week, test your skills with Binder Clip Diving! Once again, you have all the supplies already in your office to compete in this event. 

How to Play Binder Clip Diving:

1. Collect two binder clips for each player and clip each pair together at the openings.
2. Fill a cup with water and set it on the floor under a table or ledge.
3. With two players squaring off, one at a time, players will push their divers from the edge of the table or ledge, aiming for the cup. Score one point for each dive that makes it in the water.
4. After each player takes a turn, move the cup further away from the edge to increase difficulty.
5. The player with the most points after three rounds is the winner.

 
Take a picture of your team in action and submit it for a chance to win $200 Baudville credit by emailing it to us at contest@baudville.com. Then visit our Facebook page, like your photo, and encourage your friends to like it, too! If your image has the most likes on Friday, you’ll take home the gold!

May the odds be ever in your favor.

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Cori is Baudville's in-house Recognitionista (she's officially a Certified Recognition Professional, too)  and a member of the Millennial generation. Get her employee recognition tips and special discounts by liking Baudville on Facebook.

Being responsible for Baudville’s social media has many perks, but my favorite benefit is meeting professionals from around the country. Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know talented professionals who not only excel in their day jobs but have also made a name for themselves on social media. They share their knowledge and experience on blogs, Twitter, and more with the goal to help others excel in their careers, too.

Ben Eubanks, of the UpStart HR blog, is one of those individuals. Not only have Ben and I swapped tweets, emails, and phone calls, but we’ve been able to meet in person at HR conferences like the Society for Human Resource Management’s Annual Conference in Atlanta last month. When Ben and I connected this summer, we started talking about having fun at work. It turns out Ben’s workplace is a fun place to be! I asked him to share some of his office’s favorite fun activities here on the blog and lucky for us he obliged!

Check out Ben’s fun at work activities below and visit his blog for more tips and ideas you can use in your workplace!

Having fun at work 

Paper airplanes... Ice cream... No, this isn't a 9-year old's wish list for the summer; it's just a sampling of the fun events that we put on every so often where I work. At Pinnacle, one of our core values is to create a safe and enjoyable work environment. We take the "enjoyable" part seriously by developing fun activities to help bring our teams closer together. Let's look at how that works with each event.

Paper airplane contest

Every year we hold a paper airplane competition to see who has what it takes to win one of the two prizes. We give awards for best design and farthest flight, so those of us without an engineering degree still have a chance to win it!

When we started the tradition, we weren't sure how our staff would take it. After all, at our local office we are made up of approximately 50% software engineers, 25% senior leadership, and 25% operations staff.

Within minutes of the first ever competition getting underway we had employees lining the hall where the judging took place. Our next edition is scheduled for next month, and we'll see if someone can topple our reigning champions.


The winning design! 

Ice cream day

If you take the time to look hard enough, there's a holiday for everything--including ice cream! Last year was the first time we celebrated National Ice Cream Day, but we did so with our usual flair. We had 4 kinds of ice cream, a dozen toppings, and half an hour of everyone watching me reload my bowl until I was practically oozing ice cream from my pores.

And of course we couldn't eat all the ice cream in one day, so for the following week the staff would meet for impromptu "ice cream chats" to talk over projects and deliverables over a nice, cold bowl of ice creamy goodness.

All hands on deck

One of my favorite traditions at Pinnacle surprisingly has nothing to do with ice cream or paper airplanes. Every quarter we have an All Hands Briefing where all employees are gathered in conference rooms around the country, listening to our senior leaders talk candidly about where we are, where we're going, and how we're going to get there. It's an exciting time to get the information directly from the people who make the "big decisions" on a daily basis without filters or distractions.

For new staff, it's a chance to see a piece of our history and culture that ties all of the little things we do back together. If they are managed well, these kinds of events can be even more powerful than the fun/frivolous kind and help to develop a strong bond among the staff and leadership.

What about you? Any fun, unique events that you do at your own company? If not, why not?

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Ben Eubanks wrote the book on corporate culture. He’s an HR pro from Huntsville, AL where he spends his days working as an HR Generalist for Pinnacle Solutions, a small government contractor focusing on the aviation training industry. He spends his nights writing at upstartHR-an HR blog with a focus on humor, humility, and how-to. When he’s not working or blogging, he’s getting ready for the next HRevolution (an HR conference on steroids) and chasing his twin toddler girls around the yard.

The Summer Olympics are taking place across the pond in London, but you can experience the thrill and excitement of the games in your very own office! Enter the Baudville Games for a chance to win $200 Baudville credit! This week’s challenge is the Rubber Band Archery event.

Rubber Band Archery is easy to play, and most likely you have all the supplies at your finger tips already! Download our free archery target from Baudville.com and follow these three easy instructions to play:

How to Play Rubber Band Archery:
1. Download and print our free target, and collect enough rubber bands for each player.
2. Assemble your players at the firing line and have them alternate shooting at the target.
3. The player with the highest points after three shots is the winner!

 

Make sure to snap a picture of your team in the heat of competition and submit it for a chance to win $200 Baudville credit by emailing us at contest@baudville.com. We’ll post it on our Facebook page , and if your image has the most likes on Friday, you’ll win the $200! It may not be a gold medal, but it’s still a pretty nice reward!
Let the games begin!

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Cori is Baudville's in-house Recognitionista (she's officially a Certified Recognition Professional, too)  and a member of the Millennial generation. Get her employee recognition tips and special discounts by liking Baudville on Facebook.

Over the last week, I’ve enjoyed having so many voices of Baudville share their stories that I thought I’d continue by introducing my co-worker, Dean, who is here to make a very special announcement about the Baudville Games.

Dean was integral in bringing the Games to life, from concept through execution, so who better to tell you more? Take it away, Dean!

You might ask yourself: what are the Baudville Games?

For us here at Baudville we wanted to bring some of the enthusiasm of the summer games to offices everywhere, including our own. Baudville has always been the place to balance a heavy workload with some fun and excitement during the day, and we are keeping that tradition alive with the Baudville Games!

Baudville Games give businesses a way to break up the workday by providing quick and easy-to-do office games with everyone on your team. A different game will be posted every week on our website and on our Facebook page. Companies will register, participate, and then email their best game photo to us every week. Photos will be shown on Facebook, and the one with the most likes will win $200 in Baudville product! (That’s $200 in Baudville product every week, too, so if you’re super-creative and popular with our voters, you could bring home some major bacon!)  

After a lot of serious (and sometimes not-so-serious) deliberation, our marketing and design team came up with four different games that we (and, we hope, you) will be playing over the next four weeks: Rubber Band Archery, Binder Clip Diving, Mental Gymnastics, and Office Soccer. All four of these events are easy to do and fun to play. The great thing about all of these games is that everyone can play them with the supplies they have in the office. Look for me as one of the competitors in Rubber Band Archery, where I’m known as Dead Eye Dean!

The energy has already started to build here at the ‘ville and it’s amazing to watch coworkers get so excited about these impromptu breaks. It’s all about recharging people during the workday and keeping them energized during the distracting summer months. What better way to do it than a little fun and friendly competition?

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Dean has been with the ‘ville for a whopping 10 years! He shows his stuff designing our catalogs, a variety of print pieces, and even some of our products. Dean is an avid golfer, a recent (very happy) newlywed, and in-house table tennis ace. He’s also currently the only male in a department full of women. Stay strong, Dean!

The last contributor to our Health & Wellness Series is Laura. She was my team captain in last year’s challenge and served as a co-captain for her team, Buff n’ Stuff, this year. I can tell you first-hand that she means business!

Laura’s commitment to getting healthier started well before our challenge kicked off, so by day one she was already on her way to meeting her goals. I happen to know that, in total, she’s lost about double in pounds of what she reported here. And it shows!

Want to know Laura’s secrets? Read on!

What were your fitness goals at the start of the challenge?
I wanted to lose weight (20+ pounds) and also quit snacking after dinner!



In what way did the challenge help you reach your goals? 
I had started my own personal focus on becoming healthy six weeks before the challenge started, so by the time of the kickoff I was on my way to reaching my goals, but also becoming bored with my routine. So, the start of the challenge gave me a newfound reason to keep going. The challenge also helped me to focus on not necessarily HOW MUCH I was eating, but WHAT I was eating as well. The extra point incentive for eating my fruits and veggies was a big contributor to my success, combined with my increase in workouts. I started to see the pounds drop!



What kinds of changes did you make and what results did you see? 
My personal goal was to stop snacking after dinner—to eat my fill and be done for the night. I found it too easy to count my calories for the day, be under my calorie goal, and then somehow justify that I could “eat the difference” in my p.m. snack. I want the blood, sweat, and tears in my weekly Zumba classes to be worth it, so the snacking HAD to go. During the 10 weeks of the challenge, I was able to lose 18.8 pounds!



Now that the challenge is over, what do you feel are the long term benefits?
I now know the right combination of eating healthy and exercising, and understand that it takes both of these things for me to be successful. I also learned creative ways to get my fruits/veggies in. For example, slamming a V8 Fusion drink: my new favorite!



What advice do you have for others who want to make healthy changes?
LIFE is going to get in the way and throw us off our intended track. It’s inevitable. It’s how we come out on the other side that proves our strength. I will be the first to say I had a few rough weeks during this challenge, but I was able to pick up where I left off and get re-focused on my goals.

Has this series inspired you to start a health & wellness program at your workplace?
Tell us about it in the comments!

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Laura has been with Baudville since 2005, keeping us in the black as our accounting rep and resident numbers nerd. Laura may seem like a mild-mannered soccer mom, but she shows her competitive side as the reigning “Go Go Ghost” champ in her household. She also ran the 25K in our local 5/3 River Bank Run a couple of years back. I’d say that’s kind of a big deal!