By Kari Lomanno

 Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream offers its employees three pints of ice cream per day. Pfizer gives its employees free drugs, including Viagra. Xperts Inc. of Richmond, Va., gave its employees $1,500 each to cover the cost of decorating their own work spaces. WRQ of Seattle has a nap room featuring futons and a mountain view. Finova Group of Phoenix put together a “fun committee” called the Funovators to create activities meant to bring life to the workplace.

 All of these companies are weird, according to John Putzier in his book, "Get Weird! 101 Innovative Ways to Make Your Company a Great Place to Work" – and to him, that is a very good thing.

“To ‘get weird’ is to ‘be yourself,’” Putzier wrote, “sometimes at the expense of how others see you.”

Why is this a good thing? Because weird companies are creative, innovative and adventurous. Today’s labor market is very different than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Employees no longer put up with poor working conditions such as drab office environments and tyrannical bosses. They aren’t willing to hold on to one job for life. As a result, employers are scrambling to make the workplace a more pleasant place to be so that employees will want to spend more of their time there.

“The current prolonged skilled labor crisis has finally created the opportunity (born out of the necessity) for employers to try almost anything to attract, retain and motivate the best and the brightest,” Putzeir wrote. “Employers are no longer in the driver’s seat, and that can be good news for everyone.”

The philosophy behind Get Weird is that work does not have to be a place of drudgery that’s devoid of humor. In fact, work can be downright fun if employers are willing to go beyond the daily grind and experiment with some new ideas.

Putzier has put together 101 weird ideas for employers to make life more pleasant for their workers. The ideas are separated into chapters relating to recruitment, retention, company culture, recognition, training and public relations.

Idea #4, for instance, provides a list of weird interview questions designed to discover an applicant’s attitude toward work, a concept borrowed from Southwest Airlines’ philosophy of “Hire for attitude – train for skill.”

Some examples include:
“What’s your personal motto?
Tell me your favorite joke.
You’ve got one seat left in your fallout shelter. Who gets it?
What’s the first thing you usually do at work in the morning?
Describe yourself in three words.”

Idea #34 suggests that companies provide free food as a “workplace perk and productivity enhancer.”

“Maybe on a hot midsummer day, you can have a truckload of ice cream bars delivered for a mid-afternoon break. There are ice cream parlors that will deliver and set up a complete ice cream buffet with all the toppings at a very reasonable price, so employees can create their own ice cream masterpieces.”

Idea #59 suggests changing the smell of the workplace by adding potpourri or even popcorn.
“I have seen this concept implemented most effectively in the health care field because every doctor’s office and every hospital smells alike…Wouldn’t it be a pleasant surprise to walk into a hospital or a doctor’s or dentist’s office and smell potpourri instead of antiseptic? Espresso instead of sterilizer? Popcorn instead of plastic?”

Most of Pultzier’s ideas are interesting, if only to get the reader’s mind moving in a creative direction. But many of his ideas border on childish, such as #55, which suggests that workers bring in their baby pictures for display so others can try to guess who they are. Idea #65 says employees should put on a “one-minute parade” for employees who have won an award or achieved a milestone, complete with personal “floats” and noisemakers. Idea #66 suggests employees name each room in the office something amusing. Idea #79 suggests that bosses create a “mystery mess” with a prize at the bottom to encourage workers to look for and clean up clutter.

Can you imagine an office where employees had the time to build floats and bosses sat around making meaningless messes?

Despite the fact that some ideas would work better for first-graders than corporate employees, the book is a good source to help get those creative juices flowing. It’s well-organized and easy to read, and, as Idea #101 points out, “It’s all in your head.” In other words, the book’s purpose is to help employers come up with their own weird ideas, and it certainly works to that end.

 Kari Lomanno  works for Inside Business, a weekly business journal in Virginia.