June is here, and time for my monthly “cool things to do with your employees” post.

For some strange reason, food is in the spotlight in June. Not only is it National Candy Month, someone must have really had the munchies—during the first week alone, each of the following foods have their own day:

Donuts
Rocky Road [ice cream]
Frozen Yogurt
Cheese
Applesauce Cake
Chocolate Ice Cream, and
Jelly-Filled Donuts

What? ‘Jelly-filled’ donuts get their own day? Is someone afraid we won’t get enough of them on the ‘generic’ donut day? 

Since not too much of this list falls into the ‘health food’ category (there’s more sugar on that list than you can shake a stick at), you could go several different routes with this:

A) Make the first week of June “Junk Food Week.” Ideas: These foods could be made available on their respective days, or see who can come up the most unique desert by combining at least four of these items into one, calorie-filled creation.

B) Make the first week of June “Sugar Awareness Week.” Ideas: Gather info on how much sugar is in our food (example: Jelly-Filled Donut), and what it does to our teeth and our bodies. Make posters or do a daily email blast company-wide with mock news alerts about the quantity of sugar in our food.

C) Do both A and B.  

June is also National Rose Month (trivia), so decorating the office with vases of those barbed blossoms could be fun. Since many people grow roses, you could have a weekly contest with people bringing in a single rose for judging. Have those who don’t grow roses at home be the judges.

Getting back to the sugar for a moment, June is National Iced-Tea Month. Make it available in the lunchrooms or have a ‘sip-off’ (like a chili cook-off), in which people bring their favorite iced-tea recipes and somebody wins a prize for the best-tasting iced-tea.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that this is also International People Skills Month. I can’t think of a workplace on the planet that couldn’t benefit from an improvement in people skills. To engage everyone on this, have each employee choose a book on the topic and create either a summary or an all out book review.  It doesn’t have to be a formal write up—it could even be a collage of pictures from magazines with brief explanations of what each picture represents.  Post all this on the bulletin board or in the lunch room.

There’s a lot more in June, but I’ll wrap up with just two more that ought to be easy for finding fun things to do with your employees: 

June 10 is National Yo-Yo Day
June 18 is National Picnic Day

You certainly don’t need me to offer any suggestions for cool things to do with your employees on those days.  ;-)   Summer is upon us – have fun!  

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Filed in Work, Business, Opinion, Motivation, Management, Leadership, Team Building, Workplace, Corporate Culture