“PLAY every day, keeps the doctor away”
-Kristi Herold
Friends at Work: Creating Connections for a Happy and Thriving Workplace
Discover how workplace friendships boost engagement, loyalty, and productivity. And create a thriving company culture.
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The Power of Play: Uniting Nations, Transforming Workplaces
If the transformative power of PLAY can unite nations, imagine what it can do for your workplace culture! Learn how playfulness ignites innovation and fosters a dynamic, cohesive team.
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The (Slightly) Serious Benefits of Company Sports Teams
Five reasons a company sports team benefits employee wellness and creates a company culture that people love to work for.
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Go PLAY Days (The Case for Summer Hours & Productivity)
Summer Hours and playtime is the secret recipe for a happy, productive, and ridiculously cool workplace. Here’s how Go Play Days create work-life balance at JAM.
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What’s in a name?
Since we re-branded a couple years ago, I have had a lot of people wondering and asking…where did the name JAM come from? After 25 years as the Sport & Social Club, why would you change your name, especially during a global pandemic? What does JAM mean? Short answer. I thrive in chaos…kidding (sort of).…
Charting the Course to Onboarding Your Summer Interns: 3 Ways to Help Them Navigate the Waters
Set your summer interns up for success with playful onboarding experiences! Check out my latest blog for 3 fun ways to navigate the waters.
Why force the issue?
Companies around the world are forcing their employees back to the office, against their will. Remember when your Mom forced you to wear a dress but you wanted to wear jeans, or when your Dad forced you to take a nap and you weren’t tired? How happy did you feel being forced to do something…
Huddle Up!
Is your team missing seeing each other as you are working from home with only the occasional day in the office? Or perhaps everyone is working fully remotely? Are you feeling the loss of those random sparks and laughs you used to enjoy when you would connect with your teammates at the office? You may…
My 2023 Workplace Culture Prediction
Fostering flexibility and belonging will create a thriving workplace culture. Like a 500-hour trained yogi, utmost flexibility will be demanded by the workforce in 2023. With technological advances the age of “work from anywhere” is here to stay as the flexibility it affords is very appealing to employees. Organizations that want to retain great people will be…
PLAY creates lives.
PLAY creates friendships…and lives! Levi Cooperman is the co-founder of FreshBooks, that little Canadian start-up that achieved unicorn status a year or so ago, and he credits playing with JAM for his marriage and beautiful two daughters. Here is the story, in Levi’s own words: “It was the summer of 2003 when Naama and I…
My book is launching and I’m scared sh*tless!
I have worked very hard this past year to get my new book It Pays to PLAY – How Play Improves Business Culture written and I am not afraid to share it. In fact, I am excited and proud of my book. I believe it is filled with powerful information, fun anecdotes, and helpful practical…
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We FCKD UP…and we are celebrating!!
Last evening, while preparing my son’s birthday dinner, I received a call from one of my teammates. As it is rare for me to receive calls from my team in the evening, my first thought was, this is either really good news (they’ve landed a big deal) or really bad news (what could it be?).…
Purpose = Joy.
What is the core purpose of your work? Does it bring you joy? After what felt like a refreshingly normal dinner out on King St the other night, (after so many dinners in), we were driving past Lamport Stadium and I made my husband pull over so I could jump out and stand by the…
Our Official JAM Re-brand
This month marks 25 years since I started the Sport & Social Group and we have some exciting news to share and celebrate! This past year has been incredibly challenging and has had many of us wearing different hats. With our sports leagues on pause, our team stayed focused on our core purpose of connecting…
It was the WORST of times; it was the BEST of times
March 13, 2020, was easily the hardest day of my career. On the first of what would be many zoom video calls in the year ahead, (I was in Mexico for my daughter’s grade 12 grad trip), I had to inform our 40 full-time teammates they were being placed on temporary layoff until we had…
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Chase the Vision. Do you know where you’re going?
Vision 2023 Do you have a clear vision for where your organization is headed? Is it shared with your entire team? I believe, clear purpose, vision, and values are essential to building a healthy, empowered, and fun organizational culture. In 2016 (20 years after starting my business), I shared the first 3-year “Vivid Vision”…
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Don’t be afraid to ask for help!!
This is the advice I often give to others – yet I struggle with doing so myself. Over the last 11 months, I have shared very openly the struggles of operating a small business during this pandemic – especially for those in hardest-hit industries like our Sport & Social Group. I’ve done my best…
Today, I laid off 6 of my teammates.
Today was a bad day. Today I had to have incredibly difficult conversations with 6 people I adore. Further to the layoffs, I was forced to undertake in the fall, today I had to lay off 6 more absolutely amazing people from our Sport & Social Group / JAM team and I’m left feeling angry…
3 Easy Tips to Reduce Work Stress
The holiday season is over, a new year is upon us, along with a return of day-to-day work, responsibilities and more zoom meetings. Beware, there is an inaudible enemy lurking amidst your zoom calls! It exhausts your energy levels, ruins your attentiveness, and eats away at your self-assurance. Your co-workers complain about it and your…
Hindsight is 2020.
2020 is about to be permanently in the rearview mirror – permanently behind us – permanently hindsight. A fact I’m certain many of us are grateful for. 2020 had begun with such a clear vision (pun intended) for a bright future. I launched into 2020 by saying “yes” on Jan 1st to a marital proposal…
Small business stung by pandemic pivots to raise $200,000 for charity
Today Canada’s largest adult recreational sports league, the Sport & Social Group (SSG), announces a $200,000 corporate challenge for charity called “Titans of Trivia.” The initiative is led by JAM (www.workplayjam.com), the newly created remote events arm of SSG which helps corporate teams worldwide keep their culture thriving by hosting playful events keeping their teams…
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I am struggling and I am certain I am not alone
It has been 4 weeks since the Sport & Social Club made the difficult decision to shut down our operations, a few days before being mandated to do so. May 2020, should be a celebration of the start of my 25th year of getting people off the couch, playing and making real-life social connections. The…
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Slamming your Competition – Help or Hinder??
Does slamming your competition when marketing, help or hinder you? Perhaps, the better question to ask, does doing so help or hinder your competition? Recently, we received some marketing material from a competing organization to ours. This competitor decided to compare their service to “Other Sports Clubs” using the Toronto Sport & Social Club’s…
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Do we make our own luck?
Ever hear the saying, “you gotta be good to be lucky and lucky to be good”? Well I believe this to be absolutely true! The other day at my staff book club we were discussing our most recent read, Jenn Sincero’s “You are a Badass”. During our discussion it became clear that some of my…
Bench the Kids and Take the Field
Why Parents should Play Sports too! When the Sport & Social Club first had members kicking balls, throwing discs and hitting homeruns, the sidelines at our games looked like this; …empty…there were few spectators and definitely no children or baby strollers. Back then the average member was 23 years old and single. But as the…
New Year’s Resolution: Don’t give up a thing
As we move into a New Year, that dreaded word “resolution” is back with a vengeance. Every year society encourages us to give something up to improve ourselves. But why should we have to ‘quit’ something to make ourselves better people?! This year I propose a new twist! Instead of quitting something, why not resolve…
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