9
At first, it looks like your average television news traffic report: The bright “Traffic Alert” graphic fades into a man in a suit standing in front of a map.
No accidents or slowdowns today – not unusual for a mid-sized city at 5:45 on a Friday morning.
Then the first notes of House of Pain's Jump Around squeal through the air, and traffic reporter Bob Herzog begins pogoing wildly across the set. As the map zooms in to show Interstate 71, the music switches to Van Halen, and he busts out a David Lee Roth-style scissor kick.
“Ohhhh, hamstring!” Mr. Herzog groans, before segueing to a live traffic camera.
The Cincinnati, Ohio, television reporter has elevated slow news days to high art – or at least entertainment.
Mr. Herzog and his colleagues at WKRC-TV have become stars on YouTube, where their goofy on-air tradition has attracted international attention.
The concept is simple: When there's no traffic news on Friday morning – which happens regularly in Cincinnati, population 332,000 – it's dance-party time in front of the traffic map. As reporter Jen Dalton put it on WKRC's most popular YouTube video, “No major accidents are going on, no major slowdowns, we have nothing, as you can see on the board, to report, so therefore: We Shall Dance.”
And why not? Almost everyone has the equivalent of slow news days: times when you've got to be at work even though there's little to do. Maybe it's the hours before a long weekend, or the day after your department finishes a big project. Instead of going through the motions, playing solitaire on your computer or daydreaming about your vacation, why not seize the moment and do something fun and creative with your downtime?
Fears of ridicule and career suicide are two reasons why not. But Mr. Herzog didn't let that stop him, and now he's fielding career offers from stations that otherwise would have never heard of him.
“It is just crazy,” he said in a phone interview. “I can't believe I'm talking to someone in Toronto about Dance Party Friday.” The phenomenon started last year when a friend showed Mr. Herzog a funny YouTube clip of high-school kids celebrating a “Dance Party Friday.”
“I thought, ‘I should do that once,'” Mr. Herzog said, quickly adding, “Don't get me wrong – I can't dance. At all. I'm bad – I'm really bad.”
(To be fair, what he lacks in formal training and natural rhythm he makes up for in enthusiasm.)
So he shook his groove thing in front of the traffic map one Friday, the morning news team had a laugh, and he thought that was it. But after the next week's dance-free newscast, the complaints started: What happened to the dancing? Why didn't Bob dance this morning?
And thus, Dance Party Friday was born. There are ground rules, which Mr. Herzog discussed with his boss at the start: He dances only when there are no tragic stories in the news and no accidents on the road. No one wants to watch reporters shimmying around images of a kidnapped child or a 10-car pileup.
“He said he trusted me not to cross any lines,” Mr. Herzog said.
A trusting boss is a prerequisite for this kind of thing. More companies should encourage or at least tolerate creative use of downtime, communication skills coach Carmine Gallo says, but many bosses just don't get it.
“Companies that score high for employee enthusiasm typically have stronger financial results, lower turnover and better customer-service scores than ones who don't,” says Mr. Gallo, author of Fire Them Up!, a guide to motivating people at work.
“Inspiring leaders call it filling a person's emotional tank,” Mr. Gallo said. “In other words, when you offer activities that distract people from the day-to-day grind, it provides emotional fuel that gives employees more energy and stimulates creativity. Dance Party is filling the emotional tank for everyone at the station, and I would assume for viewers as well.”
Not everyone wants to bust a move at work. But how people spend their downtime is “a fascinating indicator of an individual's level of engagement with their job,” says Ruth Sirman, an Ottawa-based mediator and conflict-resolution trainer.
Polishing your résumé is an obvious danger sign, but dutifully filling every spare minute with drudgery isn't healthy either, Ms. Sirman says.
Some managers freak out over any pause in a frantic work pace – the old “you got time to lean, you got time to clean” mentality. But Ms. Sirman says downtime is no longer a dirty word in many offices: “There's an increased level of recognition that human beings need time to rejuvenate.”
That's why smart managers encourage the morning coffee klatch and the March Madness basketball pool. Rather than being time wasters, experts say, these uses of downtime build valuable office relationships that may pay off in unforeseen ways for the company.
The trick to having fun at work, though, is not taking it too far. It's all fun and games until you offend your co-worker or make a fool of yourself.
Mr. Herzog had to worry about embarrassing himself not only in front of his colleagues but in front of thousands of television viewers. He anchors the news on Saturday mornings and fills in for the regular weekday anchors. At first he feared his dancing might drain the gravitas from his news reporting.
But so far, Mr. Herzog said, the audience has followed his shifts from serious to silly without problems.
“You just have to know where those lines are,” he said. Perhaps the popularity of Dance Party Friday indicates the untapped potential of people who want to cut loose – footloose – a little more often, even at 5:45 a.m., and even at work.
“There's so much bad news out there – there's bills to pay, there's stories about kids getting hurt,” Mr. Herzog said. “Maybe this one moment with this guy who couldn't dance his way out of a paper bag tells people, ‘There's a lot out there to smile about.'”
Making the most of downtime
Not ready to bust a move? Experts suggest how to use your downtime in productive, creative and sanity-restoring ways:
Think small, but different. “Try something like walking the corridors with an ice-cream cart on a hot day, offering pops to employees at their cubicles,” communications coach Carmine Gallo says. “I saw that done once, and it put a smile on everyone's face for a week.”
When you go for coffee, invite co-workers or someone from a different department, advises Lewis Rusen, managing director of the Toronto office of human-resources firm Korn/Ferry. Now it's not a Starbucks run, it's a team-building exercise.
Try reading your company's website for a change. Take the opportunity to learn something about your employer, Mr. Rusen says.
Relax and enjoy, says management psychologist Karissa Thacker: “Take some personal time back in a low-key way. You will often be giving up personal time during crunch season.”
Just don't draw too much attention: “DO NOT … overtly goof off when you have downtime,” Dr. Thacker warns. “It signals immaturity.” Unless it's Dance Party Friday, in which case it signals awesomeness.
Rebecca Dube
