Blog: Join the Fun Club to beat Monday blues

Life @ Work

Join the Fun Club to beat Monday blues

Here are some tips inspired from Tyler Durden's movie Fight Club to help you set up a Fun Club
Join the Fun Club to beat Monday blues

“God damn it! An entire generation going to office every morning, checking emails, listening to client calls. The endless wait for the weekend has us pass the week. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no great excitement. No great passion. Our great war’s getting that Monday off…our Great Depression is our lives.” – We need a Club.

Workplace is full of young men and women living a humdrum life following a routine of working five days a week, partying on the weekend, suffering from insomnia on Sunday night and worrying about the Monday blues. This is pretty much the life of most of the corporate fellas.

The routine, work monotony and the blues lead to frustration and low performance.  As the owner/HR/management of the company, you need to do something exciting in the workplace to raise the energies, beat the blues and increase the adrenaline rush – you need to start A CLUB – A FUN CLUB.

The idea for the blog is inspired by the movie ‘Fight Club’ (starring the good looking Brad Pitt). The movie is about a young man who leads a pretty boring life assessing car crashes to determine if his automobile company should issue recalls to fix problems. He suffers from insomnia and takes to attending group therapy sessions for people who have survived various diseases. His life changes when he meets Tyler Durden on a flight home. Tyler seems to be everything that he’s not and together they create a group for bare knuckle fighting. It soon becomes all the rage with fight clubs springing up across the country.

Just as in Fight Club, every employee at workplace requires a dash of fun, excitement, some surprise element and little mystery to keep the passion of work alive. Having fun at work not only improves productivity but also helps build team relations.

To beat the boredom and frustration at the workplace, the management should form a secret society , a group – called the secret fun at work group (SFAWG).

SFAWG group should be a secret group responsible for conducting fun activities for employees with the aim to engage and motivate them.

4 Rules of FUN CLUB that every company should follow:

1st Rule: You do not talk about Fun club

2nd Rule: You do not talk about Fun club

3rd Rule: If the fun club says its activity time, no questions asked, no explanations given; its just time to have some fun

4th Rule: Only the club should know who the members are

Few employees should be chosen to be a part of this group. Other than the owner or the management, none should be aware of who the members of the group are. The group should function secretly. They should be responsible for coming up with a quarterly plan and budget for the fun at work activities and executing the same. All this should be done in all secrecy and the activities should be a surprise for the employees.

Surprise gives a feeling of happiness and excitement that helps break the monotony and increases productivity. In fact, there are number of studies on how happiness leads to increase in productivity. In one of the studies, Researchers at the University of Warwick and IZA Bonn conducted a study using 565 test subjects. In their study paper titled, Happiness and Productivity, they say they found evidence there is a causal link between happiness and productivity. Specifically, they said in the group of test subjects that were exposed to an experience to make them happier, these people had 10-12% greater success on certain tests

Researchers also claim that when the human mind is happy, it releases dopamine that motivates us to persevere through a challenge and increases productivity. Thus, having regular fun at work activities will ensure an increase in the  levels of performance in the work place.

At the end of the day, all that a company needs is a motivated, proactive well performing team. ‘SFAWG team will help in infusing the energy and passion back in to the employee’s work life. Work will no longer be monotonous or boring; frustration levels will be low and employees will be motivated. Most importantly, owing to the surprise element, employees will look forward to coming to office, thus eliminating the Monday morning blues.

Try this at your workplace and build a proactive team. “You are not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your $##$$**# khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

Are you ready to join the FUN CLUB?

Disclaimer: This is a contributed post. The statements, opinions and data contained are solely those of the individual authors and contributors and not of People Matters and the editor(s).

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Topics: Life @ Work, #Blog

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