Not only can change be unsettling, but downright chaotic. At Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, CA, a shortage of parking spaces had developed. After months of endless meetings to tackle the problem, administration revealed plans for a new parking structure. However, precious parking spaces had temporarily disappeared while construction took place, and the parking lots were knotted every morning. The hospital’s personnel manager showed how to defuse some of the frustration in the following memo:
TO: Employees
FROM: Management
Re: Employee Parking Rules
Employees may participate in a demolition derby that starts in employee lots each morning promptly at 9:00 a.m. after all the spaces are filled. Employees who do not participate will automatically be declared losers.
Employees who park illegally one time will be warned, after two times, will be stripped and flogged in front of other violators, and after three times will be forced to eat all their meals in the company cafeteria.
Employees whose cars stick out in traffic lanes will have their rear ends painted red. If they continue to park this way, we will do the same thing to their cars.
A human resource director I knew used an amusing tactical device to make sure her memos were noticed. Whenever she sent a memo to other departments, she would attach it to a cartoon, toy, or prop. “People will not only read the memos but remember them as well,” she asserted.
One of the most popular exercises in my seminar is when I give the group a typically heavy-handed memo from a hypothetical company, and have them rewrite it in a humorous fashion. I break off the group into teams of six or seven people to collectively brainstorm funny, creative, and outrageous reconfigurations of the memo.
After a time frame of 15-20 minutes to recreate the memo, each group appoints a spokesperson to read the revised copy. I’m always impressed with how clever and funny many of them are, as are the participants who created them. In Hawaii, one team rewrote the whole memo in Hawaiian Pidgin English, while another reworked theirs in “Ebonics”. It’s tremendously valuable for them to experience working, creating, and laughing together as a team.
