Returning from a course on motivating teams an office manager is fired up with enthusiasm. Her lucky team struggle to express their gratitude.
Long after the Covid lockdowns and working from home mostly over office manager Kerry Oakey (Audi) is very aware that the office just does not have the same atmosphere and zing. She thought that once they were back to 80% of the people working back in the office the mood would change.
Kerry is conscious that she might have been a little over the top in forcing lots of people to come back to working in the office by threatening them with redundancy. That was nearly a year ago and she is certain they will have got over it by now. Kerry has made a conscious effort to always be in the break room at 11, although she is usually on her own.
A senior manager sent her on a course; How to Enthuse Your Team with Patronising Gimmicks. Full of ideas on how to force her team to be more fun at work she announced her ideas by sending an email telling everyone that they had to be in the break room at 11.
The first item on her list of how to make life a living hell for her team was to randomly assign everyone into coffee buddy pairs to spend time being forced to talk to each other. She even provided them with a list of conversation starters…
- What one person, living or dead, would you want to have over for tea?
- What emoji do you use the most with the office?
- If you had to eat one meal for the rest of your life, what meal would you pick?
- What would your biographer title your biography?
- What is your idea of hell on earth?
Kerry promised them if they did well with that then they could have a game of charades as a treat.