Departmental “Fun” Days
Honestly, how hard is it to get a bunch of people out to play minigolf for a couple of hours? The department I’m in has (at my count) about 11 people in it, and they are trying to organize a “fun day” consisting of some minigolf funtime followed by some food at the nearby food place (by wonderland). So far I’ve recieved 6 emails, each with a different date plan, ranging from the afternoon of a workday to weekends to mornings. The last one said that nothing will happen till September because it’s apparently impossible to get people organized for a couple of hours without multiple months notice (though to be fair all of August is out because one person is on holidays).
I’m not sure if I should laugh or not. At Merilus we had people out pretty much every friday for a fun activity (normally volleyball) with no problems. Granted, the whole office was invited (30 people) and generally no more than 10 showed up. However, the first time we did this we had three or four courts full of people playing volleyball. It was simple, say “we’re going to do [activity] on [date]”. If someone didn’t come, no big deal.
Not that I’m complaining, a departmental fun day should be Friday afternoon in my opinion, not the morning, or outside of work hours (though there are exceptions).
Sounds like you have a lot of ‘planners’ and nobody to take the reins and make the final decision. You need someone to finally put their foot down and say we’re going to do $activityx this day, at this time at this place. Make sure though that the time you pick you get a majority of people…but otherwise, if people can’t make it, too bad! Then you need someone to keep everyone interested, or to do a little whining and get more people to come 🙂
Actually it’s more that there is one planner (or several that came up with the idea, and one girl in charge of implementing it) and she is too scared to exclude anyone, and wants to make sure that everyone is there. It sounds like this is a relatively new thing as well, but I could be wrong.
Reminds me of trying to get 8 or 10 people to agree on a place to go to lunch… eventually you just give up, and go with 4 or 5 to sushi or a nearby sandwich/soup place…
Wim