Playing Pays Dividends on Profits

Easter is just around the corner and the sun is shining - time for some fun and games. Whatever your age, child-like qualities such as a sense of fun and a vivid imagination can not only make your life more enjoyable, they can make your business more profitable too!

Take laughter - adults laugh on average 15 times a day - children do that before breakfast, laughing on average 20 times more often than adults. Laughter is indeed magical - it creates an instant feelgood boost, but has hidden benefits to your health: it strengthens your immune system, lowers blood pressure, stimulates blood flow and boosts cardiovascular fitness.

Whilst laughter and work don't often seem to go hand in hand, perhaps they should....

The Proven Benefits of a Lighter Workplace:

Research has shown that humour and play in the workplace can have a dramatic impact on both people and profits:

* Improved morale
* Improved relationships
* Increased creativity (up to 50% at science giant Monsanto)
* Breakthroughs in productivity
* Increased job satisfaction (and thus reduced staff turnover)
* Better and faster decision-making
* Reduced customer complaints

So today, over Easter and then, hey let's go for it, for the rest of your life, your mission if to be light hearted at work.

To laugh. To share jokes. To dance and sing in the corridor (try it in the loos, it really freaks people out!). To instigate a 'worst holiday photo ever' competition. To have a 3pm dance-off in the elevator. To skip to your next meeting - preferably arm in arm with someone else. To have an impromtu picnic in the park and play frisbee. To go out and buy a round of ice-creams for your team. To prefix everyone's names with King, Queen, Prince or Princess next week in honour of the Royal Wedding.

To find a steep grassy hill and roll down it - it'll take your breath away! To see how giddy you can get on a roundabout looking up at the sky. To stop calling it 'work' and start calling it 'paid-play' - and watch the expressions as you tell people you're off to "paid play" in the morning!

Not enough suggestions? Get out your crayons, sit on the floor and brainstorm some more... or if you're really stuck in the mud visit this website which lists 101 of them...

The question is this - how old would you be, if you didn't know how old you are? Me? Somewhere around 12 and three quarters, going on 21!!!

Humour in Creating Groups

One way to lighten the mood, open people's minds and de-stress people during presentations and workshops is by using humour.

There are very gentle, subtle ways of encouraging a playful or light-hearted attitude during your workshop that don't rely on telling jokes or things outside your natural personality.

It is an essential element of learning that everyone gets a chance to apply new knowledge or practise new skills. As they say "you don't learn to ride a bike by reading a manual."

When using interactive exercises, you will need to create pairs, or small groups for these interactive elements, and in doing that you easily add humour. Here are some suggestions for creating groups:

1) Using sweets - especially retro ones that cause a stir and get people talking. Have a bag with different kinds of sweets (say four of each kind if you want groups of four) and hand them around as a lucky dip. Things like refreshers, lover hearts, gob stoppers for example. If you do this at the beginning when people arrive, you can then ask them to remember the sweet they have already eaten!

2) Using badges - by badges of 70s, 80s, or even 90s bands (ebay is the perfect place to find them) and do a lucky dip again, or lay them out for people to choose. Choose the decade depending on your audience - some will remember swooning over David Cassidy or the Bay City Rollers and some would just go "who?"

If you have created pairs and want to determine who goes first, instead of just asking the group to decide, why not use the following statements to determine who goes first:

* the person with the most vowels in their full name
* the person with the longest fingernail (any finger on any hand)
* the person who has the most nieces and nephews (aunts and uncles etc)
* the person with the biggest watch
* the person with the most unusual thing in their pocket or purse

Think of some unusual methods to form groups and pick who goes first and you will add an element of surprise into your workshops, that automatically raise them above the run-of-the-mill expectations.

Good luck and please share your own ideas for forming groups here on the light the spark facebook page....