Countdown to Christmas: Day 14 – Footie fun

One of the major sporting events from 2014, the FIFA World Cup, brought its own challenges for organisations in working out the best way to enable business to continue, while embracing the fun.

As part of my Advent series I’ve turned the clock back to the Summer and am republishing an article looking at how a Housing Association overcame this conundrum…

How to turn football into charity funds

How can you turn a sporting occasion into a chance to raise money for charity and bring employees together?

A housing association that manages over 17,000 homes in the south east of England, Guinness South, has done exactly that.

Here Carol Ross, Communications Officer at Guinness South writes for my blog to continue my series of articles focusing on what companies are doing to mark the football World Cup.

I’ve featured the company before in this article by Dawn Robinson, who looked at how they have been using the familiar (TV game shows) to explain something new.

Over to you Carol…

World Cup celebrations kick off at Guinness South

Just as many of you will be enjoying the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Guinness South employees are also embracing the football tournament with charitable dress down days, competitions, World Food days and a five-a-side football match, raising over £250 for charity.

We’ve been focusing efforts as part of our wider fundraising plans to raise money for good causes over the next year.

GuinessKaren Willard, HR Business Partner, said: “Celebrating this huge sporting event is not only bringing employees together with competitions, cooking and camaraderie, but helping to raise money for one of their chosen charities, Cancer Research UK.

“Celebrations kicked off on 12 June, the day of the first match in Brazil, with a Dress Down day; employees were encouraged to wear football shirts or the colours or national dress of participating countries in exchange for a donation to charity. Sweepstakes are under way in each office as well as a predictor competition to guess, amongst other challenges, who the eventual World Cup Champions will be.

“What has proved to be the most popular so far has been the World Food Days that are taking place in each office. Employees who wanted to take part drew a participating country out of a hat and had to bring food representing that country.

“The Milton Keynes office held theirs on Monday 16 June and staff really went all out to impress their colleagues with a wide array of delicious dishes from all round the World, including Nigerian jollof rice, Columbian empanadas, Russian apple cake, a selection of French cheeses and a typical English Afternoon Tea. We were not only impressed with the effort everyone had made but we were also extremely well fed!” added Karen.

A five-a-side fun football match between employees is also taking place on 2 July in Milton Keynes, UK.

The majority of these activities have been arranged or take place outside of working hours, in order that customer service is not negatively impacted in any way. Guinness prides itself in being a great place to work as this helps us to provide great service and these fun activities and fundraising are just one of the ways that we achieve this.

Post author: Carol Ross.

What a lot of delicious food! Thank you for giving us a peek into what you’ve been doing internally Carol.

Do activities like these help employee engagement, motivation and morale? I’m keen to know your views – feel free to comment below or you can Tweet me @AllthingsIC.

Further reading on my blog:

Embracing the World Cup celebrations at work
Can your company handle World Cup fever?
Also by Guinness South: Using the familiar to explain something new

Recent articles on my blog you may have missed:
Thoughts from today’s #commsconf
New global research uncovers comms pros’ challenges #11ways
Can graphic facilitation break down barriers to IC?
How to measure the effectiveness of social media
Where are all the other IC pros?

Rachel

First published on All Things IC blog June 2014 and republished December 2014.

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