We all know that small acts of kindness can make a big difference. Whether it’s a stranger holding open a door or a friend treating you to a cup of coffee, an act of kindness can change your perspective and your mood.

February 11-17, 2013 is the official Random Acts of Kindness Week, and it’s a great time to encourage team building and camaraderie in the office. Celebrate the week (or month, or year!) of kindness with your team by equipping them with information and ideas for both in and out of the office.

Educate your team that Random Acts of Kindness Week is coming up, and you hope everyone will participate. Fuel the group with ideas from our free 75 Random Acts of Kindness eBook and the Baudville Pinterest board. Post the ideas on a public bulletin board or print them out and keep them in a bowl. Encourage teammates to select a kindness idea and do it! At your next team meeting, ask individuals to share their Random Acts of Kindness experience.

We spend a lot of our time at work, and sometimes it feels like we see our coworkers more than our families! Make your work environment friendly, welcoming, and safe for all your employees by creating a place where acts of kindness are the norm, not the exception. A great work environment attracts and retains great talent, making your organization stronger and more successful.

As your team begins to practice acts of kindness around the office, you’ll notice the effect kindness has on your culture and your team’s attitudes. You may even decide to promote acts of kindness year round!

Do you have a great Random Act of Kindness story? Tell us about it!

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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.

Those who know me will not be surprised at all by this story. Crazy things happen to me all the time. Last week I was definitely ripe for some sort of debacle, as I’d been sailing fairly calm seas since I single-handedly demolished our garage door back in March.

It started during a toasty-warm lunch hour, when I headed out to pay my mortgage, with my check and payment stubs on my passenger seat filled out and ready to go. About halfway to the bank, I opened my sunroof to soak up some rays. And, then, when it got a little too hot, I lowered my window. This immediately created a tornado effect and all of the papers on my seat began to dance and flutter. I quickly sprang to close the window, but not before the check I had neatly endorsed was whisked through the open space. All I could do was watch through the rearview mirror as it made its hasty escape.

My first hope was that it had been run over hundreds of times after landing on the high-traffic road. Then I decided it didn’t matter, even if it wasn’t, because no one would likely be able to cash it anyway.

Then it dawned on me: all of my personal and banking details were on that check. Even though the check itself was probably useless, the information on it wasn’t. ::sigh::

I called my bank and we talked through some options, including the possibility of closing my account and starting over. ::::double sigh::::    

When Friday evening rolled around, I had the weekend on my mind, and not my forthcoming identity-protection worries. As I sorted through our household mail, a hand-addressed letter caught my attention (after all, we don’t get much of that anymore). I ripped it open, and there it was: my check—sans a single tire tread or evidence of any distress. It turns out that my check had quite an adventure, bypassing semis and SUVs and landing gently in the parking lot of a local logistics business.

The young man who found it chose not to ignore it, or just throw it away (so that I would never have the peace of mind of knowing it was safely discarded), or actually use it for ill-gotten gains. Instead, he and one of his coworkers took the time to put it in an envelope and send it back to me.

It probably didn’t take all that much time; but consider this: we speed to work in the passing lane, we try to pick the fastest-looking grocery line, we sometimes threaten our safety and others’ in the pursuit of multi-tasking. Everything in our lives is quick, quick, quick. Which makes it all the more overwhelming to me that a stranger would slow down and perform an act of kindness like this.

And that made me slow down, too, and think about opportunities I might have to do something kind for one of my fellow humans. Because, even though we sometimes forget, we really are all in this together, aren’t we?

What will you do today, big or small, to help out a friend, coworker, or stranger? Get inspired with our Random Acts of Kindness eBook. Click here to download it!

We love a good story. Tell us about an act of kindness that you’ve given or received!

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Allison is a self-proclaimed Copywriting Diva and has the certificate to prove it! She’s been writing for Baudville for three-plus years and has worked in a variety of business settings for more than 18 years. Before becoming a professional writer 11 years ago, Allison worked as a department manager where she used Baudville products to motivate her team. She’s what we call a true believer!  

There I was sitting at an intersection…just patiently waiting for the red light to turn green and then inspiration hit. I reached to the backseat to grab my padfolio to jot down this light bulb moment and just then something else hit me – the cacophony of a fellow driver’s horn. Now this was no courtesy toot – this was a six-second blast. I mean, I had time to look in the rearview mirror and see a normally kindly gentlemen with a look on his face like I had just insulted his grandmother. And for what? Five seconds of inconvenience?
 
You probably know that here at Baudville we try to promote frequent and sincere appreciation of our fellow team members as a way to boost camaraderie, engagement, and motivation in the workplace. But my little brush with a fellow human’s short fuse got me thinking perhaps I need to widen my focus a bit.

 
Do you need ideas to give appreciation and kindness? Try our You are Truly Appreciated recognition theme and new Random Acts of Kindness ideas eBook!

Well, it just so happens that Random Acts of Kindness Week is coming February 13-19, and for me the timing couldn’t be better. Perhaps our country at large is in need of a little love as well? Just think about all the people we interact with on a daily basis: the store clerks, letter carriers, public servants, fellow commuters, and complete strangers. What can we do to send some goodwill their way?
 
We can start by laying off the horn – figuratively and literally. 
 
If you need ideas or free tools to join this mission, visit our Recognition Resource Center. There’s a new free download all about Random Acts of Kindness and a whole lot more there as well. Go ahead, give it a try!

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Brad Darooge is President and CEO of Baudville and a positive mojo aficionado. He brings the positive mojo to work every day along with his bike. In addition to leading Baudville, Brad is also an amateur triathlete.

It doesn’t seem possible (time flies when you’re having fun!); but just about exactly a year ago I wrote about an outing that the creative group and I took to a letter press studio. You can read about that here, if you’re interested.

I was thrilled with the experience and the value it brought to us as a team and as individuals. And, ever since, I’ve been scheming new ideas for our next big adventure, preferably an activity of equal or greater value. That calling came one day when a little bird landed on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. OK, actually it was our VP of Product and Merchandising.

And she wasn’t whispering, she was raving—about a charity event she’d attended the night before that benefited a local organization called Kids Food Basket, which does a pretty amazing job of fighting childhood hunger in our city. What she was so impressed with is that this operation somehow manages to supply free, nutritious “sack suppers” to more that 4,600 kids in need every weekday. Wow, right?

This organization does not receive any funds from the Federal, State, County, or City governments, so they rely entirely on the generous donations of individuals and local businesses in the community. And they also rely on a lot of volunteers.

Volunteers, you say? Ah, our next endeavor was knocking at our door. Because what’s better than doing something that benefits us? Doing something that benefits others!

Last Wednesday was our scheduled time, and when we got there, I started to understand why we could only bring a small group: the ratio of donated goods to human bodies was pretty astonishing. Sky high stacks of bread and cases of lunchmeat—all put to use by us in a sandwich-making extravaganza.

Because we’re pretty experienced with teamwork, we quickly fell into a pattern that utilized each person efficiently: from accurate counting, to dexterous bagging, to artful building we all did our thing. And, at the end of just one short hour, we had made 650 sandwiches. During that time we chatted, and laughed, and maneuvered around each other with cooperation and goodwill. Not that we don’t normally; but the spirit of kindness definitely took it up a notch.

  
12 people + 1 hour + 100% teamwork = 650 sandwiches!

Without question, the best part was that we did a good deed that helped people less fortunate than us. But we also had an opportunity to connect with one another in a way that had nothing to do with work, but ended up being the biggest teamwork success of the week. Nice!

What kinds of activities do you do with your team – inside or outside the office – that improve teamwork and camaraderie? Tell us about them here!

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Allison is a self-proclaimed Copywriting Diva and has the certificate to prove it! She’s been writing for Baudville for three years and has worked in a variety of business settings for more than 18 years. Before becoming a professional writer 11 years ago, Allison worked as a department manager where she used Baudville products to motivate her team. She’s what we call a true believer! 

Happy Valentine’s Day! Each year, Valentine’s Day marks the beginning of Random Acts of Kindness Week. Today through February 20th, the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation will present an Extreme Kindness Challenge for you to complete. A few Baudvillians are planning on taking part in the challenge, and we hope you will, too!

We were inspired by one of our vendors, John, who traveled to Haiti this past summer. John was one of ten people who worked all week mixing cement, clearing debris, and carrying supplies as part of an effort to repair a school and church in Thomas, Haiti. In addition to reconstruction work, John spread kindness with some of our Great Job lapel pins. His random acts of kindness were directed at the children he met, each of whom received a colorful lapel pin. As you can tell by the pictures, the kids were excited to wear their pins!

Random acts of kindness can be almost anything from buying a stranger’s coffee to brushing the snow off a co-worker’s car. Our challenge for you is to write a co-worker a note letting them know how much you appreciate them. Include an extra blank note card so they can pass along the positive mojo. The idea of Random Acts of Kindness week is that a small gesture can have a huge impact on the recipient.

Spread some kindness this week! You can start by sending a Valentine’s Day ePraise from Baudville.com for free. Tell us about your kindness experience here, on Facebook, or with the hashtag #dokindness on Twitter. We can’t wait to hear your stories!

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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.