Office Hack #12 — Gamifying the Office Kitchen
Envoy is all about making things easier and more fun in the office. In that spirit, we are proud to bring you our new Envoy Office Hacks podcast series. Every week, we deliver the coolest, most ingenious, and just plain fun fixes people have invented to improve efficiency and productivity in their workplace.
Today’s Office Hack squares the workplace kitchen heroes against the zeroes. Spanning is an Austin-based software company specializing in data back-up. But as Spanning grew, so did its office kitchen problems.
Listen to this story on our Office Hacks podcast.
Dirty dishes towered next to the sink. Coffee pots sat empty more often than full. Paper towel dispensers presented only bare cardboard. It wasn’t long before shaming emails started flying and things went from bad to worse.
This company needed a solution.
Two Spanning employees dedicated 9 months of their weekends and evenings to crack the problem. And they did. Developers Gordon Bockus and Patty Cifra created a way to gamify the company kitchen.
The pair designed a program that would track who at Spanning loaded the dishwasher, purchased paper towel, made fresh coffee, and a host of other duties common to office kitchens.
Any contribution in the shared kitchen would earn you points. Points would earn you prizes.
The app meant employees could track their activities, and the activities of others. Every month, Spanning rewards another kitchen MVP — and the company’s messy, pesky problems in its common kitchen have vanished.
In fact, the application has worked so well at Spanning, its developers have offered it up for free, online.
“(The app) really is trying to make the kitchen an easier, happier place.”
Gordon Bockus, co-creator
How to hack it
If you’d like to gamify your office kitchen, you can download the free“Who Made Coffee” app here: https://whomade.coffee/
Recipe
- Sign up your team
- Customize your kitchen’s tasks
- Assign point values to the tasks
- Design a contest and prep the prizes
- Enjoy a cleaner office kitchen!
Listen & Subscribe
You can listen to the full story in the Envoy Office Hacks podcast:
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More Office Hacks
If you enjoyed this hack be sure to check out other Envoy Office Hacks, including:
A mobile meeting space in a rolling room from white-hot software start-up, Slack:
And one office’s creative solution to boring office walls — the Wall of Lego:
And a social psychology experiment in healthy eating from Social Print Studio:
Or how about a robotic sales gong to crank up team spirit in the office:
And then there’s Hootsuite’s office hack: an open office turned ski village.
Never underestimate the power of taxidermy on company culture…
Pub Nub hacks its way from annoying coffee woes… to website.
Mozilla takes something old and makes it new again.
One man’s getaway is another man’s office.
A big orange slide makes getting around this office a whole lot of fun.
No office boardroom is complete without some paddles and a net.
