The Pink Palace, the Memphis Zoo, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Jerry’s Sno Cones, the Humane Society of Memphis & Shelby County, a Memphis Redbirds game, a food truck rodeo, a walking tour of Downtown Memphis, a trip to Muddy’s Bake Shop…the list goes on!

These are a few examples of what we like to call the Obsidian fun team event. Once a month, we take a couple of hours out of one workday to relax and do something fun as a team. Most of the time, we try to find something free or at least relatively cheap, and we’ve been pretty successful. What’s $5 to $10 when you get to take a couple of hours off work to do something fun?

Why are these important? Because sometimes, you just have to get out of the office and do something fun to shake things up! We are entrenched daily in important client work in what I like to call a “strategic thinking-intensive career.” Public relations requires constant strategic thinking, and sometimes that can lead to brain fuzz.

Fun team events allow us to decompress for a couple of hours, relax and bond as co-workers. Bonding leads to better brainstorming, a better office environment and better overall outcomes for us and for our clients. Thankfully, the way we operate at our firm allows time for us to do this each month, and with eight team members in the Memphis office, it is a little easier to organize.

If you don’t already have a regular fun team event in your office, I encourage you to suggest it to your boss, making sure to highlight the reasons why it’s such a good idea. Or, if it’s not possible for your office to host a fun team event, I encourage you to take your lunch hour every once in a while to go do something quickly and out of the ordinary. You’ll be surprised the difference it makes in your day, week and month!

Here’s a list of 365 things to do in Memphis!