Celebrate Holidays at Work for Motivation and Teamwork

Celebrate Holidays at Work for Motivation and TeamworkCelebrate Holidays at Work for Motivation and TeamworkTraditions are important in companies just as they are in families. And, nothing is more important than the annual traditions workplaces establish around the celebration of seasonal holidays. A holiday celebration builds positive morale which results in increased employee motivation. High morale and motivation contribute to team building and productivity. Productive teams are responsible for the success of your organization. Traditions can range from costume parades at Halloween to food drives for the needy in November and December. Lunch celebrations, evening holiday dinners and the wearing of the green for St. Patricks Day are annual traditions that people can count on and look forward to celebrating at work. You will want to avoid celebrating specific religious holidays to honor the diverse people in your organization. But for positive motivation, productivity improvement, e mployee happiness, and team building, youll enjoy creating seasonal holidays and celebrating secular occasions you designate as special in your company. Here are ideas for the successful organization of events, mistakes to avoid and ideas for traditions you can start and share. Here are holiday celebration ideas for your workplace. fasson a Guiding Group for Holiday Planning In a mid-sized Michigan manufacturing company, a group of people leads the event planning. Known as the Activity Committee, members from across the company plan and orchestrate a diverse series of events throughout the year. Because member continuity is strong in the team, traditions are honored and continued during each passing year. You do need a group, with representatives from across the company, to plan and implement your events.Only by doing this can you ensure that the needs and interests of your employees are well represented and respected. Staggering the groups membership (one year term, two-year te rm, and so forth) allows you to pay attention to the teams institutional memory while still bringing in fresh ideas and new perspectives. Lessons Learned in Holiday Event Planning Some of the lessons the team learned over the years will shorten your learning curvesince they have also been observed in other organizations. Perhaps you will avoid these common mistakes by learning from those who have experimented before you. Longevity matters. Often your committee is dominated by longer-term company members who can find themselves so devoted to honoring traditions, that they do not accept and honor new ideas and diversity. They claim newer members want to come to the meetings but dont want to do their share of the work. Shorter-term employees claim the committee members are platzset in their ways and not open to new ideas. They claim that they volunteer and the longer-term members turn them and their ideas down You need to make sure your committee is reaching out to new and diverse members and that people share the workload. Otherwise, the people who are often the heart and soul of your organization, retire without having developed a committed group of newer employees. This can wreak havoc with your celebration continuity. Honoring diversity can cause problems- if ignored. An annual hot dog lunch welches transformed one year by the last years complaints that vegetarians and certain religion-practicing employees can only eat vegetarian hot dogs that were not provided. The annual holiday dessert table contained no low-fat or sugar-free choices. One group brought all diet pop for their company picnic and parents scrambled to find something for their children to drink. A Thanksgiving luncheon was held during Ramadan and no boxes were supplied for fasting employees to take their lunch home. In a diverse society, attention to these kinds of special needs and details is a necessary component of celebrating holidays at work. Record keeping is essential. You need to be able to answer the questions about how many employees the group fed last year, how much food was purchased, how many pizzas served the whole crowd and how much money was collected for each charity.Your employees will want to know that the food drive brought in 300 more pounds of food this year than last. Exceeding the company record is good for motivation and for team building. Designate volunteers to serve all food. They can wear gloves they serve fair and even portions you wont run out. What? Youve never experienced fifty people descending on a buffet table and filling their plates to overflowing while remaining employees had no food?If you have ever experienced this, youll know why assigned servers are recommended. Learn from the mistakes of others. In one company, servers wear chefs hats and aprons and make serving fun. Pay attention to the endless details. Did someone pick up plates and silverware? Is a serving knife available? Is there room in the refrigerators to store extra food overnight? Lists help. Save last years lists to avoid starting fresh each year. Youll be happy that you did. Many hands make less work for all. The picnic sub-committee tapped volunteers from across the company to help with childrens games, lead nature walks, and organize a baseball game. When many help, few feel burdened. You want your workers and committee members to have fun at the events, too. Celebrate frage and Winter Holidays at Work Fall brings tree color falling leaves bounty from the garden crisp, cool days and evenings apple cider the scent of wood smoke hunding Beaujolais Nouveau wine Halloween Hannukah Columbus Day Yom Kippur Thanksgiving Ramadan and many more seasonal delights to celebrate. Winter brings snow and sleet Christmas Kwanzaa the scent of wood smoke New Years Boxing Day Martin Luther King Day St. Valentines Day St. Patricks Day and many more seasonal delights to celebrate. Teams in various organizations Have organized these events for the celebrati on of fall and winter holidays and traditions. Bring in a Thanksgiving luncheon for all company members complete with turkey and all the traditional side dishes. Local grocery stores are a great source for reasonably-priced Thanksgiving dinners.Hold a food drive for the needy during both November and December.Schedule aHalloween costume contest and paradewith all staff members voting for their favorite costumes.Serve cider and doughnuts from the local cider mill at abreak one day shortly after the first frost.For theDecember traditions and holidays, sponsor a dessert table for all employees. People may bring dessertsif they choose, but the company should also order enough treats to serve all employees. Hold a window decorating contest or a workstation decorating contest that is judged by a committee and award prizes for the best-decorated workspaces.Many organizations sponsor Secret Santa activities. Employees who want to participate, pick the name of another employee. Secret Santa events are scheduled over several weeks during which the Secret Santa slips gesundheitsgefhrdender stoffs in secret to their pal. Or, some groups ask the Secret Santa to supply one gift at an ending event. The gift is often representative of the persons work or hobbies. Always set a price limit, usually less than $25. Serve heart-shaped cookies for Valentines Day during your employee lunch break.For St. Patricks Day, promote the wearing of the green. One companys Activity Committee cooks and serves a traditional lunch of corned beef, cabbage, and boiled potatoes. At this feast, the group sells bottled water with proceeds earmarked for the March of Dimes.Ideas for holiday celebrations that create traditions in your organization are endless. These ideas will help you get started, butyour company cultureand the interests of your employees must guide your holiday celebrations and traditions. Celebrate Spring and Summer Holidays at Work Spring brings trees, grass, crops and gardens in every shade of green yellow pond flowers, crocuses, daffodils, tulips, and other spring flowers cool evenings and warmer days open houses for grads the return of the summer-only birds geese nesting near the pond baby ducks, baby geese, and fawns the first bounty from the garden Womens History Month April Fools Day Earth Day Passover Cinco de Mayo Mothers Day Fathers Day Flag Day Easter Memorial Day, and many more seasonal holidays and traditions to celebrate. Summer brings flowering trees and flower gardens hot days and warm nights beach walking sand castles U.S. Independence Day fireworks parades Labor Day vacations everywhere cottage stays, beach fires, and many more seasonal holidays and traditions to celebrate. Teams in various organizationshave organized these events for the celebration of spring and summer holidays and traditions. Offer an Easter egg hunt or roll for the children of employees. A dessert table featuring spring goodies is always a success, too.Trips to amusem ent parks are popular, particularly if the company helps pay the tab for the bus or entry.Company picnics with catered food, with or without beer and wine, with games and playscapes for the children and organized golf scrambles, softball games, horseshoes, and swimming are a big hit with employees.Hold a hot dog or hamburger roast for employees. Better, encourage your executives and managers to do the grilling. Sponsor a community garden on your company property for employees who live in apartments and want to garden. Provide the rototilling andtopsoil.Hold a company open house for family, friends, customers, and vendors. Serve finger food and provide guided tours.Provide pizza for everyone in the company each time your company successfully avoids any lost time injuries and/or accidents for a whole quarter.Sponsor and help pay for the formation of sports teams that participate in leagues. Encourage employee attendance at games and matches. Softball, bowling, soccer, golf, basketball , volleyball and more sports teams,encourage the teamwork spirit. Raise money any time through silent auctions, 50-50 raffles, the raffle of vendor gifts, and the raffle of items purchased with employee-earned frequent flyer miles. Donate the money to employees with serious health problems or other needs or to your favorite charitable organizations. Your employees will appreciate the celebrations and they add topositive workplace motivationand raiseemployee morale.

3D Printing Bridges

3D Printing Bridges 3D Printing Bridges 3D Printing BridgesThe much-touted benefits of 3D printing affordability, flexibility, and rapid production, have largely been unavailable for large-scale projects. If you want to print something bigger than a breadbox in a single pass, good luck finding the tools. Tables, bridges, and buildings are not going to come out of a MakerBot Replicator, or a Stratsys Fortus 900mc, for that matter.This is the conundrum that faced the folksat MX3D, a furniture and manufacturing company out of Amsterdam. We wanted a printer that could print a full piece of furniture, says mechanical engineer Tim Geurtjens, the companys chief technical officer. We found it didnt exist. So, OK we have to do it ourselves.To be free of the box, they wanted to make a machine that would print in lines, rather than in layers. After some experiments with resin, they realized they needed a stronger material, like steel. The answer to that need was the welding robot. Before long t he team had developed robots capable of spitting out steel in long, curving lines, drawing them in the air like some kind marker for three dimensions.To show off their technology, Geurtjens and his colleagues decided they needed a suitable demo to show off the capabilities of their new technology. It had to be a bridge, says Geurtjens. A bridge is a really symbolic thing, poetically very nice, but it also shows that with our technique you can build really big structures, virtually unlimited in size. Never mind that their town is one with some 60 miles of canals. Sketches of a bridge by Joris Laarman, created using new software. Image MX3DA few snags stood in the way of putting the welding robot to work. Early on, the nozzle would occasionally get stuck if the line it was printing grew faster than the software anticipated. So Geurtjens and his team used a laser distance sensor to continuously keep track of the position of the object and compare that to its theoretical position. In th e future, they want to print their bridge with two robots that could start on either side of a canal and meet, for completion, in the middle. To do that, theyll have to be able to communicate their positions to each other and adjust as they go.Because of the need for all this real-time positional adjustment, the MX3D printer can be tinkered with on the fly, unlike other 3D printers that run until they finish after the start button has been pushed. As Geurtjens puts it, Since we have to constantly adjust, it means we can constantly adjust.Ultimately, though, MX3D wants its welding robot to do its own adjustments. If things go as planned, they want it to do its own design as well. Our idea is to have software design the bridge, says Geurtjens. Theyve already made some strides in that direction. When they first started out, the software drove the robot, and humans had to manually determine the tool path. Now the software creates the tool path automatically. What we are working on now i s expanding that even further so the robot will determine its own strategy. Maybe its Utopian, but we want to have software thats fully automated, he says.However autonomous the printer welder becomes, its already poised to make big changes in big structures. Once the firm prints the final functional bridge it may have to do a few more, as additional bridge orders are already in. Then Geurtjens hopes to tackle the more dangerous parts of construction. Theres a lot of stuff people dont want to do but just have to do, says Geurtjens. What if we can have those taken taken over by robots? Buildings will became safer to build, but also more interesting to look at. If you look at architecture, decoration has gone out it. Its all flat facades, square corners. Its too expensive to decorate, says Geurtjens. With a technique like this, it doesnt mater any more, just send the info to a robot and it will do what you tell it to and it doesnt cost much more.Looking even further into the future, G eurtjens says robots may help us on other worlds. In the unlikely case that we colonize Mars or the Moon, we can send the robots there first, and in a few years we can join them and live in the houses theyve printed, he says. Until then we can still enjoy a nice terrestrial stroll over a canal on a 3D printed bridgesoon.Michael Abrams is an independent writer.Learn more about the latest technologies in 3D printing at ASMEs AM3D. For Further DiscussionA bridge is a really symbolic thing, poetically very nice, but it also shows that with our technique you can build really big structures, virtually unlimited in size.Tim Geurtjens, chief technical officer, MX3D

3 ways to decline a meeting you know you dont need to attend

3 ways to decline a meeting you know you dont need to attend3 ways to decline a meeting you know you dont need to attendIf you feel a pang of anxiousness when a dreaded meeting invitation lands in your email inbox, youre not alone.Heres how to manage requests for meetings that you know you dont need to attend.Emphasize that you wouldnt be able to provide much insightSara McCord, an editor and freelance writer, provides tips in The Musefor when you dont need to be therbeie, meaning, in a last minute meeting.She prefaces her advice by saying that colleagues may invite you out of respect, even if it leaves you with extra work on your end.The best approach here is to both acknowledge their gesture and affirm you wont be offended if the meeting goes on without you. It sounds like this Thanks so much for including me. From the agenda, it appears the meeting will be focused on product, so I dont think Ill be able to add anything to the discussion, she continues. Another benefit of this resp onse is that, if youre wrong and the organizer wants you to contribute, hell be able to correct you- and youll know in advance so you wont be caught off guard, she writes.Dont just say yes all the timeAlison Green, author of the Ask a Manager blog, writes on Quickbase that you should start critically evaluating all requests to meet.Theres something about a meeting invite that seems to compel people to accept even if the items being discussed at the meeting are much lower priorities than the work you would otherwise be spending that time on. Instead of continuing to fall into that trap, ask yourself this about every meeting invitation you receive Is this the best way I could be spending that time, relative to the other priorities on my plate? If the answer is no, consider declining or at least pushing for a shorter meeting time.Heres one of the responses Green recommends Id love to attend, but Im swamped this week with X and Y. Can you move forward without me? If not, maybe we can s chedule it later on this month. (Much of the time when you say this, the person will find a way to move forward without you), she writes.Strategically gather all the detailsDorie Clark, an author, professional speaker, marketing strategist and instructor of Duke Universitys Fuqua School of Business, writes about this topic in the Harvard Business Review.One of her featured tips is to make it more difficult for the meeting requesters. Its easy for someone to invite you to a meeting - too easy. One of my executive coaching clients, a media company CEO, welches constantly being pulled into unnecessary meetings. The reason? It was part of her company culture for everyone to share their calendars publicly, so people knew when she was available and would simply put in direct requests to her assistant for her to attend, Clark writes. After I advised her to unpublish her calendar, have her assistant enforce a more rigorous vetting process, and funnel her meeting availability onto particula r days, her schedule freed up dramatically.Clark also writes about how her client would ask meeting organizers questions about why she should be in attendance and what decision needs to be made, among others.Whether or not youll be able to skip out on the meeting in question depends on the nature of both your workplace and the circumstances, but these methods might just work out in your favor.