April Fool’s Day is just around the corner, which means it’s the time of year when office pranks are most likely to occur.
Obviously, office based pranks can be a great source of fun in the workplace and can help teams bond together for the benefit of all. However, there is a balance to be struck and it’s important to ensure that what should be just a bit of fun doesn’t tip over into actual workplace bullying.
So, if you’re an employer who’s concerned about preserving worker wellbeing this silly season, then make sure you follow these three simple steps.
Talk To Your Employees
As with every other office based conundrum, the key is to maintain excellent communication with your employees. If you know your staff and have a good dialogue with them, then everything else should follow easily.
For example, do you know which members of your team might have a nut allergy, be diabetic or be coeliac? If you have employees with allergies or food intolerances, it’s important to make sure you, as Manager, are aware of the issue and have disseminated the appropriate information to the rest of the team. Otherwise office jokes involving food could seriously backfire and end up requiring medical assistance.
Similarly, employees might have personal aversions to certain things, such as a fear of spiders or a fear of the dark. Often, these can be more than just a whimsical disliking, but can be rooted in childhood trauma. If such a circumstance were to be true, then suddenly facing that employee with the thing they fear could cause serious upset and distress when what was intended was a mere ‘joke’.
Hence, it’s crucial that, if you are going to allow office pranks to be performed this April Fool’s Day, you speak to your staff first about what they might feel comfortable with and what their limits are and then share that information with everyone else in the office. Obviously, this can be done in a sensitive manner, should some of the information you receive be of a personal nature.
Set Out Boundaries
Once you aware of what absolutely can’t be done in terms of workplace pranks, then you will be able to set boundaries around what is permitted and what is not.
For example, you could provide some guidelines around what is not permitted, such as excluding food and drink from jokes, or excluding jokes that involve people’s personal property. Alternatively, you might wish to provide some positive examples of pranks that would be permitted, and allow your team to select one of those instead.
Remember, these guidelines are not to stop your employees from having fun and enjoying a laugh, but are simply there to make the day safe and inclusive for everyone, so make sure you make that fact known too. If your team think you are simply imposing restrictions with no justification, then they will think you are a kill-joy and are unlikely to include you in future fun.
Similarly, to ensure that one or two members of staff are not picked out for being the cause of any restrictions, it might be wise to anonymise the information you give out. For e.g., instead of saying ‘no jokes involving food because Cheryl is allergic to nuts’, simply say ‘no jokes without food due to nut allergies amongst the team’. Obviously, this works better the bigger your team, but it may be helpful to make sure everyone feels included even in smaller teams.
On the other hand, if your employees do not want their personal information about them shared with their colleagues, even on an anonymised basis, then make it known instead that anyone wishing to carry out a practical joke needs to run the plan by you first, so that you can confirm whether or not your team will find it funny and whether or not it might cause inadvertent harm.
Follow Through With Action
Like parenting, good staff management is all about following through.
If you have followed the two steps above and have talked to your employees about what would be permitted and the reasons behind it, but they have still carried out a prank that contravened the guidelines, then it is appropriate to speak to those members of staff and take disciplinary procedures.
Remember, April Fool’s Day is supposed to be a time of bringing joy and fun to the office and giving your team a sense of ‘togetherness’. If the actions of one or two employees have caused pain, distress or upset to any other member of staff, then the situation must be rectified and quickly and it is your responsibility to act.
If no action is taken and the perpetrators are permitted to ‘get away with it’, then the member of staff who was detrimentally affected may feel victimised and resentful, and negative consequences may arise as a result. If you, as Manager, feel a joke has gone too far, then you are within your rights to commence your company’s disciplinary procedures.
However, if you follow steps one and two above properly first, hopefully there will be no need to resort to step three! We hope you have an enjoyable – and funny – April Fool’s Day.
Contact Wellspace
If you’d like to find out more about how you can preserve worker wellbeing this April Fool’s Day, then please do get in touch with Wellspace today.
Wellspace are the leading providers of employee wellbeing programmes, so we can help you put your most precious asset – your staff – at the heart of your business.
Contact Wellspace today by phoning 0808 178 0748, emailing info@yourwellspace.com or filling out the contact form on our website.
