imaginehappiness Tag
Ideas for pranks at work

Who did this?

The office is sometimes a silly place – at least it should be. A group that jokes around occasionally and do unharmful pranks from time to time tends to be one that is positive, results-oriented and successful. You already work 50 to 60 hours a week, mostly in the office or in uncomfortable setting, and sometimes you need a little laughter to break up the day and recharge from all the time spent focusing on the serious stuff. Ideas of placing a mannequin in your seat, wrapping someone’s car with sticky notes, or covering their desk area with real green grass are just a sample of how a few minutes of planning for fun can fill your brain with the happiness hormone.


And if you needed a reason for doing this, consider a 2012 meta-review of studies on humor in the workplace found that it is linked with strong employee performance, effective stress-coping mechanisms and strong group cohesiveness. Those jokes and pranks can serve as signs of a healthy workplace, and provide ways to foster trust and good communication among staff.


Just pay attention that jokes are not signaling someone out or being considered as bullying, under the title “I was joking”. As any comedian will tell you, attempts at humor sometimes can fall flat or even backfire. Get to know your colleagues well before you start joking around, enlist other accomplices, and have fun.

Expanding your experiences

For some people, work is life.

For others, they work is in the way of living life.

And then there are all who fall in the spectrum between those two.

Regardless of where you are and how much you love your job, there’s great value in finding experiences that help you detach from work and become more involved and absorbed in your non-work life.

Typically these experiences involve learning new things (i.e.g a new language), seeking out intellectual challenges (e.g., playing chess), doing things to challenge ourselves (e.g., competing in triathlons), or simply doing things to broaden our horizons (e.g., taking a class in a field different from our job).

The more varied experiences you get involved in, the more you broaden your view and create the conditions to sharpen your systems thinking and analogy making skills. Not only that, but getting involved in outside experiences help us in two ways:

First, they force us to devote our mental and intellectual resources to something other than work. Doing so enables us to achieve some level of detachment from it.

Second, they can be highly reinforcing. They allow us to feel a sense of achievement and accomplishment. This can add to our satisfaction on the job or compensate for it should we find ourselves not in the ideal work environment.

How many outside experiences are you involved in that help you detach from work at a psychological level?