Fonality, like so many of your firms out there, is a deadly serious company. As much as it would be a gas to make video games or holiday gag jokes like our long-time Fonality customer, JibJab, that's *just* not what we do here. We make mission critical business phone systems. Our product, akin to my last company which provided commercial web hosting, is as core to a business as is their electricity or internet service. If your phone system is not working right, your business is not working right.

And, we get that. We have worked every day for the past six years to make our product more feature-rich, our support more helpful, our fulfillment faster, etc. All good stuff and all stuff we will continue to do for years to come. But, during that time, I have tried to always remind my company: "Whilst we work harder, we may play harderest." By this I mean: mission critical businesses can become employee churn heaven if you forget that it is OK to both work hard AND have fun at the same time.

So many companies stifle all the fun out of their firm — I guess they have to in order to not offend anybody. But, if done right, you can still have fun and not be too offensive. Mulling through a few of the random fun things we have done over the years:

As a benign starter, we all dressed up pretty big for Halloween this year. I was impressed by how few "store bought" outfits there were.

Some of the Fonality Crew

Click for larger picture

SVP Operations, Dir of Engineering,
L1 Support, and...err..me.
(I'll let you guess who is who....)

Click for larger picture

 

Earlier this year, we did the Fonality Fight Club. See what the Wall Street Journal had to say about that.

Yep, we all got in the ring and punched each other in the face for free vacation time. Sounds crazy...but we all think it was one of the coolest things ever done in corporate culture history. See who won and who lost.

Then, there is "The Love Machine" — a little piece of Perl code written by yours truly (I stole the concept from my friend and long-time Fonality customer, Philipe Rosdale, founder of Linden Lab / Second Life, and then adapted it for Fonality). The Love Machine is an Intranet gadget that lets any employee of Fonality express gratitude publicly to any other employee. Not only does this make people feel good for going that extra mile, but you also get some money each quarter for the number of loves you have earned. Contrary to popular opinion, money *can* buy you love! Here is a snapshot of today's Fonality Love Machine:

Let's see. We also have "Little Red Wagon Wednesdays". Every Wednesday a different exec pushes around a wagon full of fruits and candies — employees are limited to grabbing any 3 items. Seems expensive...but its actually not. And it really has become something that people look forward too. Sometimes it's the little things...

Oh, oh I know one! A while back, our VP of Marketing "Rickrolled" me. Rickroll is a crazy internet meme from a couple years back (Rickroll for charity now!) Whelp, he shouldn't mess with the CTO — I paid him back by force Rickrolling him in two ways:

1. He is perma-coded on our management page as the teen idol himself. This makes it awkward when he has to hire someone in Marketing and they show up for the interview expecting a teenager from the 80s.
2. We hard-coded him into our HUD Photo Caller-ID feature as Rick. This means that every time this VP calls anyone in the company, much to his chagrin, he appears like this on our screens:

Running out of time and there are so many really funny things to choose from (like the time Joel, one of our engineers, drank blue food coloring on a bet about what it *would* or *would not* do to certain organs. It was sorta safe and there are pictures, and they are really really funny. Probably best not to post them here tho.)

If I had more time I would explain Fonality's hilarious substitute for inter-office bets (no money betting around here, just humiliation betting).

What sort of fun things do you do around your office? Leave me a comment, and if you have pics/video send those here.