Although not all companies celebrate the hard work of their employees, some companies take the time, and often the appreciation takes the form of an annual company picnic. And while larger businesses may hire someone outside the office to plan and host the picnic, many smaller businesses will plan their picnics in-house to save costs. Saving money is all very well, but planning a large company picnic around the schedules of a large number of employees isn’t necessarily easy. So you’ll want to use the tips available to get it right and throw a great picnic.
Of course, the easiest way out would be to hire an external service to do most of the work. But planning a picnic can actually be quite a lot of fun, and you don’t want to miss out on that. And as long as you follow three simple rules, you’ll have no trouble planning a great company picnic that everyone will really enjoy.
1. Plan Ahead – As with any type of social event of this magnitude, it’s extremely important to start planning ahead for a number of reasons. On the one hand, you want to be sure that you can reserve the place where you want to have your company picnic. If there are only a few options, they may fill up quickly. In addition, you want to ensure that your employees have enough time to make plans to go to the company picnic, and with busy lifestyles, this can be difficult.
Setting the date, reserving the venue, and getting shooting early in the planning process will mean less stress at the end. And less stress means you can enjoy the picnic, too.
2. Be diverse: The picnic you plan should be as diverse as the people who work for you. There is a pretty good chance that your employees will enjoy a wide range of activities, food, and entertainment. Therefore, you should take this into account when planning your picnic. After all, your company picnic is a way to show appreciation to your employees. So you don’t want to leave anyone out.
You might want to get people to give you suggestions directly or even send out a survey to find out what kinds of things people like. Whatever you do, make sure you have something for everyone and nothing that will offend anyone and you should be fine.
3. Use conferences: It can be beneficial if you organize a kind of focus group to help you plan, and you can easily reach those people with a conference call program. Your focus group can help you work out all the details for the picnic and can discuss them with you through lectures.
The best part is that the conference programs can be downloaded from the Internet at no cost to you, not something you can say about the rest of your company picnic plans. Download your conference call software ahead of time and you’ll be ready to go with a conference call in no time.
Company picnics are supposed to be fun, but only after all the planning has been done. But if you plan ahead, plan well, and communicate with others through conferences, you can enjoy your company picnic and your employees too.