let’s talk about unusual office traditions

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

One of the most popular “ask the readers” posts last year was on unusual but fun office traditions. Here’s some of what got shared last year:

• We had The Team Plant. It was a nice ordinary office houseplant in a basket, and it didn’t belong to anyone in particular. Most of the time it lived on a credenza in the middle of our open space. But sometimes the team would just decide that you deserved or needed to have The Team Plant on your desk for a while. You might find it on your desk if you got a promotion or had a new grandchild, or if your car was damaged in a fender-bender or someone on your account team left the company, or if you had a cold and were dragging. It appeared on my desk the week my father died and stayed there for a while, and then one of my co-workers completed a difficult project and I passed it on to him.

• My floor has all of the lights off. We don’t like fluorescent lights. New people get a handful of poop emoji erasers to use as weapons to toss when you need someone’s attention but they have headphones on.

• I worked in a very casual workplace (shorts, jeans, basically anything goes as long as it’s not too revealing), and we would occasionally have a “Formal Friday” (like casual Friday, but the opposite, get it?). Some people would just dress office snazzy, some would wear something you’d wear to a cocktail party, and some people used the opportunity to bust out their 80s/90s apparel with shoulder pads and chunky gold jewelry. Good fun. (And, of course, totally optional.)

• We have interns who graduate into permanent employees after finishing their PhDs. We have a strange tradition of making people recite their thesis topic in iambic pentameter.

• I have just joined a team where people have huge adult terry cloth bibs to wear at lunch time. (The kind that can be bought in bulk for nursing homes.) Mine was bestowed on me this week and I am surprisingly happy about it.

There was a clamor to share unusual office traditions again this year, so have it at: please share in the comments!