news: fun & games

With many employers cutting back on workplace festivities this Christmas, seasonal cheer may be in short supply in Britain’s offices.

Given that staff may end up having to do more themselves this year, we’ve redeveloped our online secret Santa tool, to make it easier to arrange low price gift giving amongst your colleagues. You tell us your colleagues’ names and addresses and it will do the rest, pairing people up with someone, but keeping it all hush hush as to who bought what for who.

Give it a go now at www.worksmart.org.uk/santa - It’s a fun, inexpensive way of keeping the Christmas spirit alive in workplaces that might not have had much to smile about recently.

You can also use our online greetings cards to send a personal Christmas message to friends and colleagues. You’ll find a selection of Christmas themed cards in our ecards section.

And to help those at work over the festive break, we’ve put together a guide to the pitfalls of working through Christmas and the New Year. Banned from sticking up tinsel, or worried you’ll have to work through Christmas lunch? We’ve got answers for your festive problems.

And of course, all of us at workSMART want to wish all our users a very happy Christmas and a great start to the working year in 2009.

posted 09/12/2008

You know those unpleasant, macho TV ads we’ve had in recent years, where employees chug super-strength cold remedies in order to drag themselves to their desks, thus avoiding the sack for being a sniffly wimp?

Well, here’s a nice antidote to them from retro syrup makers Covonia, whose latest PR survey of 4,000 office staff shows that in real life, nobody wants a mucus trooper on the desk next to them. Read more…

posted 21/11/2007

Today’s lunchtime web diversion comes courtesy of union organisation UNI. They’re annoyed about the level of secret monitoring they’ve encountered in offices around the world, with sneaky bosses spying on staff through hidden microphones and cameras. It’s all a bit Spooks, so they’ve made a game where you go undercover to shoot out the office bugs with your trusty staple gun. Read more…

posted 18/10/2007

As tinsel starts to go up on desks around the country, and sprouts appear in works canteens, loads of people will be expecting a visit from ’secret santa’. Read more…

posted 04/12/2006