The WOW! Buzz

A full time employee can expect to spend at least 2,000 hours per year at work. That’s over 30% of all the wakeful hours in a year. If you have to be somewhere, why not make it as fun as possible? Here at WOW! we have a lot of fun and it seems to touch all five of our senses.

You see people having fun every day. They’re smiling in the Warehouse. They’re pointing out positive customer comments posted on bulletin boards. They’re helping each other figure out the latest technology on their cell phones. They’re laughing. They’re sitting together in the lunchroom watching the Olympics and cheering for the American women’s curling team.

It’s not uncommon to hear hearty belly laughs coming from any area of the building. My office is centrally located so I hear them a lot while I’m  working away at my desk. You know what else I hear almost every day? Someone whistling. When I was in college a professor once told me a sign of a happy employee is if you hear them whistle while they work. (Isn’t there a song about that?)

When we have something to celebrate we taste the victory with food. Over the past years we’ve had cake countless times to honor JD Power Awards, milestone birthdays, and recipients of company awards. To commemorate our seventh consecutive profit sharing payout we had a cereal-abration with boxes and boxes of sugary or fiberlicious goodness to kick off the day.

Touching is technically a faux-pas in the workplace, but that’s not always the case. Employees regularly greet each other with a handshake or a hand slap. When an individual or team has accomplished a feat there are a many high fives and pats on the back to say, ‘Great job!’  (And sometimes we actually share some hugs.  Shhhh.)

What does fun smell like? To me, it smells like crock pots simmering in the kitchen on themed potluck days like our annual Lu-WOW! celebration. Last week we had breakfast burritos for everyone for winning a contest. I heard an employee pass by my office door, following his nose to to the kitchen saying, “I don’t know what it is, but it smells like awesome!”

We are fortunate to work for a company that promotes the sight, sound, taste, touch and smell of fun.  We’re also fortunate to work with people who choose to make every day a good day and contribute to the fun at WOW!