Everyone who enjoys going to meetings, put up your hand. What, no hands raised? OK, so we all agree that meetings are one of the necessary evils of many workplaces. But it doesn’t always have to be that way.

Most people don’t like meetings because the gathering aren’t interactive and they usually lack entertainment.

But that doesn’t mean that any old kind of fun, games and frivolity is going to help lighten the mood. You need to have a starting point and an ending point, and a purpose.

Otherwise, attempts to lighten up meetings can turn into free-form activities, where you can’t reel workers back in and actually achieve the goal of the meeting.

Here are a few ideas management pros are using to break up the monotony:

• Give everyone a piece of paper and ask them to draw a penny, front and back, from memory. Then, have employees pass it to the person next to them, and repeat the cycle. It’ll soon become obvious that no one person can successfully complete this task — it takes a team effort.
• One manager brings Play-Doh to meetings, and employees play with it to break up the tension. There’s a higher purpose, she said: Being physically creative with the Play-Doh helps spark mentally creative processes.
• Finally, one boss uses a slightly off-color can of “Whoop Ass” to reward team members who offer the most valuable and creative input during meetings. The employee can display the “award” until the next meeting.

Tags: management, meetings