Celebrating International Day of Happiness, SA Oil Style

Since 2013, the United Nations has celebrated the International Day of Happiness, recognising the importance of happiness in people’s lives. This year, we joined in on the celebrations – with a little twist, a lot of flavour, and some useful internal marketing techniques! Read more…

The McDonald’s Business Model

Looking to one of the most influential brands in the world, our Happiness Day celebrations were angled at researching the McDonald’s business model and using it as inspiration to fuel better workplace principles within our own company. McDonald’s has seen untold success over the years, in particular through their Happy Meal – which was only meant to be a once-off marketing gimmick! Apart from this overwhelmingly successful campaign, the company has achieved success in other ways, such as through thorough employee training at the Hamburger University, internal upskilling programs, and with a rigorous reframing of their product offering.

A Happy Business Model of Our Own

For our International Day of Happiness festivities, our team set about investigating the various ways McDonald’s achieved such success. Here’s what we had to do…

1. Research McDonald’s
2. Pull out one aspect of the company’s business model, marketing strategy, sales methods, customer service or HR strategies, etc., that we find remarkable or important
3. Adapt this information into a practical, implementable process or principle that we can use at SA Oil
4. Bring this along to our gathering and present it to the rest of the team.

This exercise proved most useful, as our team came together and produced some really inspiring ideas and strategies which we hope to implement in future, creating our own happy business model and a happier work environment!

Happily, the Reward was Worth the Work!

All that work and research was rewarded with our own ‘happy meal’ – some tasty treats to end a successful teambuilding activity!

Internal Marketing and its Happy Advantages

This activity had many benefits for the SA Oil team (apart from the scrumptious treats!) and highlighted the importance of internal marketing. This principle focuses on selling a brand to employees – an effort just as important as marketing to customers! Teambuilding events bring the members of a team closer together and allow for the flow of ideas, enable people to voice their opinions in an open, comfortable space, and help create a unified work effort.

This activity also allowed us to initiate an inter-company competition, the voting of our MVP, or ‘Most Valued Player’. This initiative is aimed at motivating and incentivising our team to engage more and to bolster performance – the work will be worth it as each event grants the winner an appropriately-themed prize, as well as allows them to accumulate points. The MVP with the most points wins the secret grand prize at year end…

Happy is as Happy Does!

Internal marketing and teambuilding activities like these improve our #WorkEnergy and help develop healthy internal relationships, so we’ll be scheduling happy activities like these year-round! If you’ve got what it takes to be a part of the SA Oil team (and enjoy tasty treats every now and then) send us your CV!