Patients and vendors are a crucial element of your dental practice, and we think they’re great. That being said, their thank you treats can start to weigh down your break room table (and the scale), which means it’s time for some creative intervention. Or, not so much creative as stress-relieving.
Here are five ways to use them that don’t involve eating them or immediately sending them to the trash.
1. Biscotti Lincoln Log Building Contest
Bring a dose of childhood nostalgia into your day. Biscotti is the perfect building material due to it’s dense state, and it’s flat shape adds stability. So why would you not hold a biscotti building contest? Those fine-motor skills that make your team so great at their jobs will serve them well in this challenge, as they work to balance biscotti to create their masterpiece. Optional: destructing them with hot water while watching them crumble.
2. Cookie Golf
Frisbee golf is all the rage, but we have the next adaptation bound to revolutionize the sport: cookie golf. Set up boxes, bowls, or people as the goals and see how your skills compare to your coworkers. Pro tip: This works best with those rock hard cookies you’ll find in the break room after coming back from New Years and you’re all holding fast to those resolutions
3. Face Mask Candy Launch
Let’s use those face masks for more than maximizing safety practices. Relieve the stress of the day by using these elastic wonders to launch candy towards goal lines, making teams, and starting a friendly competition. Whether it’s office staff against doctors, techs against hygienists, or everyone for themselves, offer a prize and see who steps up to the challenge.
(Hint: The prize is the leftover candy. Stress is gone, & the candy is out of the office; two birds with one stone, er, hard candy.)
4. Popcorn Ball Fight
Are snowball fights only a distant dream in your area? Popcorn ball fights are essentially the same thing. Whether you go the everyone for themselves dodgeball route, or if you use furniture or cars as protection for an afternoon of team building, there’s no chance of someone playing dirty with ice since popcorn is about the lightest and safest building material available.
Unless you want to be finding popcorn until Memorial Day, we recommend taking this one outside. Fresh air is good for you, anyways.
5. Chocolate Bar Sculpting
No need for ice when you have oversized chocolate bars, right? We’re sure those expensive dental tools would be perfect for shaving chocolate away to reveal your masterpiece. It’s also a great way to unleash your creativity previously reserved for brace color schemes.
You could have prizes for most realistic, dental related, and most technically challenging. You could also see who can create the most lifelike set of teeth.
(We still recommend leftover treats as prizes. As if you didn’t see this coming.)
Even though the holidays can be filled with appreciation in the form of treats, it doesn’t need to take over your break room. It’s actually a chance for workplace bonding, because what says “relationship building” like flinging candy or throwing popcorn at one another?
