I was an active spectator of the London 2012 Olympics. I filled my DVR with events and competitions and watched nearly every evening of the games. Now, I feel a little lost. What do you mean there’s no competitive swimming or gymnastics on network TV? What am I supposed to do now!?

Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one who was full of the Olympic spirit. We had 26 entries for the Baudville Games. Teams submitted creative and crazy pictures for each of our Office Olympic events: Rubber Band Archery, Binder Clip Diving, Mental Gymnastics, and Office Soccer. If the pictures are any indication, the teams had a lot of fun participating in the events!

As we close the Baudville Games, I want to congratulate the winners one more time and share their award-winning pictures. Each team earned $200 Baudville credit for the winning pictures!

Rubber Band Archery: Great River Health Systems


Binder Clip Diving: Great River Health Systems


Mental Gymnastics: Red Hat


Office Soccer: Red Hat

 
Did you enjoy participating in the Baudville Games and want another event? Tell us what your event ideas in the comments below!

If you missed the Baudville Games, don’t worry! You can still host your own Office Olympics. Get all the game rules in our Office Games eBook  and free downloads for the events  in our Recognition Resource Center.

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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.

Congratulations to Red Hat for their victory in Mental Gymnastics last week! Their spirited picture captured over 100 likes on Facebook ! Red Hat wins $200 credit to use towards awards, lapel pins, recognition tools, and gifts. Congrats!

This week we turn our attention from Gymnastics to the exciting world of soccer, or football as it’s known in the international community. Last week, the U.S. women’s soccer team won gold after an exciting and sometimes nail biting tournament. The team had the opportunity of a rematch against the Japanese team, their 2011 World Cup opponents. Congratulations to the U.S. team on their victory!

Will you be victorious this week? In our fourth and final week of the Baudville Games, teams will compete in Office Soccer. It’s easy to play!

How to Play Office Soccer:
1. Grab the nearest inter-department memo on office slacking –or grab our free download - and crumple it into ball.
2. Select your first two players and have them sit at opposite ends of a long table, about six feet apart.
3. Players will take turns shooting the ball at the opponent’s goal (created by touching thumbs together and pressing index fingers to the table to form a window).
4. The player with the most points after five rounds is the winner. 

We’re excited to see your team’s picture! Send it to us at contest@baudville.com. We’ll upload it to our Facebook page where you and all your teammates can “like” it. The picture to receive the most likes by Friday wins the $200 Baudville credit!

Good luck!

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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.

The gymnastics events are one of the most popular competitions in the Olympics, and they’ve always been one of my favorite events. When I’m watching the Olympians compete, I find myself in awe of the grace, athleticism, and strength that they display in every movement.

And the events this year did not disappoint! It was amazing watching 16 year old Gabby Douglas fly through the air and the exceptional performance of the U.S. women’s team. They truly are a Fab Five!

When Baudville employees applied their skills to Mental Gymnastics in our Baudville Games competition, “graceful” wasn’t exactly the first word that came to mind. Ladies and gentlemen, the Baudville Terrific Three!

Will you put the Baudville team to shame? We’ll find out this week as teams compete in Mental Gymnastics!

How to Play Mental Gymnastics:
1. Download, print, and cut out our free charades cards.
2. Choose an actor and a mediator to present to your team.
3. The actor will perform the word on the card that the mediator shows him. The player who answers correctly first gets the point.
4. The player with the most points when the deck is done is the winner.

We’re excited to see your team’s pictures from Mental Gymnastics this week! After the event’s complete, submit your picture by emailing us at contest@baudville.com. We’ll upload it to our Facebook page where you and all your teammates can “like” it. The picture to receive the most likes by Monday wins the $200 Baudville credit!

The bar has certainly been raised for this week’s event. We had seven teams compete in Binder Clip Diving last week, and each team brought their A-Game. See all the competitors on Facebook. In the end, team Great River Health Systems was victorious for the second week in a row! They also took gold in Rubber Band Archery during the first week of competition. Congratulations Great River Health Systems!

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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.

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!