Office Shenanigans: Be My Valentine?
Every year at Digitas Health, Human Resources puts out a stack of Valentine’s Day cards and lets the company send out cards to coworkers. And they trust us enough as employees that those cards can be sent anonymously. The best part? Cards come with free (for me) candy!
The opportunity to have a reliable method of sending out postcards was just too tempting, so I’ve been playing around with different ways of using that medium. Here’s a highlight reel of some of my more creative ideas.
Six Degrees of Separation: A Different Kind of Scavenger Hunt
An early office Valentine experiment involved printing out an extra-large QR code, cutting it up into four pieces, and then sending those pieces out to four different coworkers to see if they could reassemble the code and unlock the secret ending. I selected people on our company’s social, mobile, and innovations teams to receive the cards because they were both predisposed to be interested enough to chase the solution down, and familiar enough with each other to mention the curious cards they received in casual conversation.
One coworker in particular took the lead in reassembling the QR codes. To hint at the proper configuration, each card had the instructional text and cute animal picture framed to hint at the final orientation.
The reward for completing my first office scavenger hunt? A link to Rick Astley’s infamous Never Gonna Give You Up music video, because I am not a nice person.
Valentine’s Day Advertising: Vote for My Thing!
The next year, Digitas Health’s Connected Health team was running an internal pitch competition for health-centric ideas for using the Apple Watch capabilities to positively influence peoples’ health.
My submission involved the ability to schedule push notifications to send calming pictures to your watch at regularly scheduled intervals (or when your watch detected elevated heart rates). To influence the vote, I co-opted the in office Valentine delivery service to send out postcard-sized advertisements, paired with candy bribes I didn’t need to pay for.
And yes, the idea won.
Abusing the Inter-Office Delivery Network
One of the coolest parts of the Valentine’s Day promotion was our ability to send out messages to our offices in other cities. As an introductory level experiment, I sent out Valentine’s Day cards to Digitas Health coworkers based out of our New York offices.
…and then mocked up a separate set of cards for some of my friends at one of our sister agencies twice removed, to congratulate them on a recent campaign they ran for Westworld.
Make it Go Viral?
This time around, playing around with the Social team involved sending out “viral” postcards with explicit sharing functionality, with overly explicit instructions on how to share.
The Paradox of a Card
For my final card, I presented HR with a paradox of sorts — would they approve of the card I addressed to them, or would they pretend it was never delivered to them in the first place?
No Lessons Were Learned Here
I sent out over a hundred semi-personalized Valentine’s Day cards to coworkers over the years, challenging myself to come up with ways of using the office postcard delivery system slightly outside its intended purpose.
Sometimes, it’s nice to just lean back and try to compassionately break systems.
Last time on Office Shenanigans: Michael pivots to video with an in-office scavenger hunt
