At Google, team members working on the same project are allowed to share an office, making it easier to communicate and share ideas.

On the last Friday of the month, a department at the Portugal office of global real estate firm Cushman Wakefield hosts a cocktail party for coworkers. Responsibility for hosting the monthly party rotates from department to department.

Johnson County Government seated in Olathe, Kansas, uses a physical bulletin board with messages for anyone who needs a positive thought for the day. They call it their Take What You Need Board. It has proven to be an inexpensive, meaningful way to share inspirational thoughts. Some people take an item for themselves and others share with another employee or client. Created at the suggestion of employees, the boards were initially created in one department and now are located in office common areas so employees, clients, and residents have access to it.

Full Beaker in Bellevue, Washington, pays for employees to have lunch every day at any restaurant of the employee's choice in the area because they feel spending time together outside the office environment allows them to build better bonds and to collaborate more efficiently. These coworker lunches help people know each other better on a personal level, and thus, they are more productive when they work together on different projects. The company becomes stronger as well when everyone knows everyone else.

“The only condition is that an employee takes one or more coworkers with them whose lunch will also be covered by the company,” says Shavkat Karimov, the company's director of SEO. “Even though we only have thirty employees, it is an expensive investment, but one we feel is worth it for the bonding that occurs between employees. We've been doing it for years.” They monitor the perk, and when lunch receipts are unusually high, a manager brings it up in the employee's one-on-one and that behavior stops. When an individual or a team has achieved a success, the CEO takes them to lunch as well.

At marketing and branding firm Parker LePla, employees are encouraged to join their coworkers in regular afternoon field trips. While on these field trips, participants go kayaking on Lake Union, go lawn bowling, or play WhirlyBall.

When Sherre Fairbanks, now a reward and recognition coordinator for the University of Michigan Medical Center, worked in an ambulatory care clinic, the clinic came up with an activity called Walk in My Shoes for a Day. In order to promote better interaction among coworkers—and get a little taste of someone else's job—each employee was paired up with another and essentially shadowed that person for the entire day. No position was off limits; the activity included the doctors, nurses, office staff, dieticians, social workers, medical assistants, lab personnel, and so on. Employees shadowed everything from regular office visits to medical procedures being completed. The goal was for everyone to really see what it was like in a job that was not their own and to better understand what coworkers might encounter. The activity promoted positive interaction among employees as well as giving them an opportunity to experience another job that they might be interested in and enjoy. “This activity proved to be the best thing that the office completed,” says Fairbanks. “From that point on, everyone looked forward to Walk in My Shoes for a Day each year.”

A gold star, an “attaboy” on the company's intranet, or small gift cards go a long way toward establishing rapport and camaraderie. The feedback I've received is that being recognized by peers can be just as powerful—if not more so—than being acknowledged by one's supervisor. I tend to like physical tokens of appreciation, as employees love to showcase these in their cubicles or on their office doors.

At project completion celebrations, employees at Dreamworks Animation present their personal projects to peers. This encourages appreciation of non-work ideas and showcases creativity.

Employees at Motley Fool reward each other with points that are redeemed for gift cards and prizes through the YouEarnedlt platform. Team member Amy Dykstra explains, “Employees benefit from feeling appreciated for their specific work and the company benefits from viewing a newsfeed of pertinent well-wishes every day. When things are busy, seeing recognition come in that someone appreciated my contribution means the world to me and invigorates me to continue working hard.”

Johnsonville Foods in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, encourages employees to learn about other parts of the company by having every employee follow another employee for a day to learn about that person's job.

Russ Mann, CEO of Covario, a designer of interactive marketing analytics software in San Diego, California, started his company's Culture Club to create opportunities for the company's employees to interact with one another. The club has sponsored a variety of events, including an online Covario Assassins game, “designed as a friendly inter-office game of ‘tag’ that pits colleague against colleague until there is only one survivor.” Says Mann, “Client problems are getting solved faster . . . because we have more communication in the team. People feel more energized to come to work, and they're happy about the kind of work and the place.”

Sabre Holdings Corporation, a travel company based in Southlake, Texas, maintains SabreTown, an online portal designed to link together the company's 9,000 employees who work in fifty-nine different countries around the globe. Similar to social networking sites Facebook and MySpace, SabreTown enables employees to create personal profiles with personal and work information, to post messages for other employees to read, to join resource groups, to ask and answer questions, to share their favorite travel destinations, and much more. The result has been the development of a global community of workers who help and support one another regardless of their particular location. One day, an employee located in Sabre's London office posted a message on SabreTown asking for advice in counting swimming laps. She quickly received seven responses to her message, including one from Sam Gilliland, Sabre's CEO, who happened to have been a competitive swimmer. Today, about 90 percent of the company's employees are active participants in SabreTown.

Fleishman-Hillard, an international public relations firm headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, uses a wide variety of meetings to involve employees in the business and to build camaraderie and teamwork. Regularly scheduled meetings include monthly “cork celebrations” to celebrate new business, births, and other milestones; quarterly meetings for peers within the company; and monthly meetings where company results in meeting goals are presented and discussed. At the company's Kansas City office, a survey showed that 100 percent of employees agreed that they are part of a group working effectively as a team, and that they are proud of their teams.

Alliance Castings of Alliance, Ohio, instituted a series of seminars called Value of the Person. During the course of these seminars, employees are taught to treat one another with dignity and respect while maintaining a work environment that is both safe and committed to producing high-quality products. These seminars resulted in better relationships between workers and management—and among one another—and increased teamwork and trust throughout the organization.

At Da Vita, the largest provider of dialysis services in the United States, employees vote on every decision, from logos to new business initiatives. Each of the company's 1,400 clinics has its own set of guidelines jointly developed by the local administrator and employees, known as teammates.

At Boeing's aircraft manufacturing plant in Renton, Washington, management decided to dump its old production system and replace it with a new, streamlined system based on Toyota's lean production model. This new system puts trust in team members to work together to discover and solve problems on their own without waiting for management to find and fix them. After adopting this new system, the plant was able to reduce the number of 737 model aircraft in production on the shop floor from twenty-nine down to eleven. At a cost of $35 to $70 million each, this reduction in work in process has saved the company many millions of dollars.

Information technology manufacturer Cisco Systems held Kids@Work days in its Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne, Australia, offices. In the Sydney office, more than 150 children joined their parents at work—and enjoyed a variety of fun activities including videoconferencing, face painting, and lunch at North Sydney Oval. According to Helena Smith, group manager for human resources, “We all work extremely hard and we like to celebrate our results. An important part of that are the families. We really want employees to feel that we do consider these other important aspects of their lives and try to bring them together.”

Each year at automobile manufacturer Ferrari S.p.A., ten teams of employees challenge one another with quality improvement projects for each of three four-month periods. An evaluation judges the teams' results for each period and assigns winners as follow: pole position (after the first four-month period), fastest lap (after the second four-month period), and chequered flag (after the final four-month period). One team is declared the overall winner at the end of the year-long “racing season,” recognized as the occupants of the winner's platform. Says one employee, “I am proud to be part of this company, where we are all one family, part of a team of excellent people working well together.”

Recruiters at Dixon Schwabl, a marketing and advertising firm located in Victor, New York, believe that assembling an eclectic group of employees helps create powerful working relationships, leading to higher levels of performance. Recruits to the Dixon Schwabl team (who are interviewed by team members during the hiring process) include a jazz radio DJ, a former professor, a bartender, a television photojournalist, and a bank executive.

Schlumberger, an oil-field-services company headquartered in Houston, Texas, has found a way to help its more than 87,000 employees, scattered in eighty countries around the world, share their knowledge with colleagues and work together more effectively. The company has organized twenty-three online Eureka communities, with areas of interest ranging from well-engineering geophysics to chemistry. These communities—along with 140 different special-interest subgroups—are self-governed by member employees, with leaders who are elected by employees to serve one-year terms.

Defense contractor Northrop Grumman of Los Angeles, California, has installed an expertise-location software tool to analyze employee email for indications of their current interests. Results of the email analysis is added to each employee's online profile—enabling coworkers to pull together project teams of like-minded employees quickly and easily. Managers also use the enhanced profiles to assign engineers to new projects.

Hack Day—an innovation activity sponsored by online portal Yahoo! of Sunnyvale, California—teams of employees are given twenty-four hours to follow their creative instincts by creating innovative new software projects for the company. A recent Hack Day attracted 102 projects, some of which became new Yahoo! products or features in existing products. Although the employees have the opportunity to win trophies for their efforts (in categories such as Best User Experience, People's Choice, and Why Did You Wait for Hack Day?), most employees enjoy the challenge and the camaraderie of working closely with their coworkers to invent something new in a short period of time.

At beer maker Coors Brewing Company, employees in the plant logistics division in Golden, Colorado, are in charge of scheduling and setting the agenda for a monthly forum specifically designed to brief managers on issues of interest to employees that don't normally get aired in regular staff meetings. After instituting these meetings, the plant went from being one of the worst performing on its business targets to one of the best.

To become a manager at Newark, Delaware, fabric manufacturer W.L. Gore & Associates, employees must first find other employees within the company who will work for them.

Beaverbrooks the Jewellers, headquartered in Lytham St. Annes, United Kingdom, recently began a program called Tell the Total Truth Faster. In this program, employees are trained how to give good feedback to one another—and to their managers—and to speak out when they are not satisfied with something about their jobs or workplace.

Level 3 Communications, a multinational telecommunications and Internet service provider, decided on a new strategy to increase employee engagement, although employees are spread across the globe. Emily Green, talent manager for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, incorporated Level 3's own technology to share their cultures with one another through conference calls. She also started a “learning month” during which anyone from the organization gets the chance to share something they are passionate about, whether business related or personal. Green says

it's totally voluntary it gives people the chance to practice sharing their ideas and get to see other parts of the company, which may get them thinking about their career path and where they would like to work. They see scope for lateral movement, rather than just moving upward.

To give employees unique ways to bond, Restaurant Equipment World takes employees on excursions outside of their office in Orlando, Florida. These experiences include bowling, laser tag, zip-lining, and pottery classes.

The entire sales staff at Mint Physician Staffing in Houston, Texas, works late one night a month to hunt for new business. A catered meal and cake are served to celebrate all the birthdays for that month. Those who stay may come in an hour later on the following day.

A few decades ago, Southwest Airlines captain Cliff Slaughter created the Cutting Edge program where pilots work on an airport ramp to learn what is entailed when a plane is at the gate. As a result of the program, agents and pilots had a better understanding and empathy with one another.

Dotson Iron Castings in Mankato, Minnesota, expects at least 50 percent of its employees to visit a customer, supplier, or another foundry each year to gather firsthand information and ideas for working together.

San Diego's Cidera Therapeutics drug company believes that researchers must be open to different viewpoints. To promote collaboration and teamwork, the company invites employees to attend an annual fishing trip, spa days, or golf games.

Lola, a travel startup in Boston created by Kayak cofounder Paul English, offers its staff of fifty-three a nutrition program with a built-in competition. The cost of $10,000 includes paying for the group program and sharing the cost for individual coaching 50/50 with employees. Stacey Scott, vice president of people operations, says, “The most important aspect of the offering (aside from building healthy habits) is that the staffers are getting to know people they don't necessarily work with each day.