Our team communication was pretty boring until I built this automation
I noticed our work chat was super quiet. People only talked about tasks and deadlines. No fun conversations or team bonding happening at all.
So I created an automated system that generates funny short stories about our colleagues every morning. The stories are totally random - sometimes it’s a sci-fi adventure, other times it’s a mystery or romance. Last week our manager was the main character in a story about saving the world from evil robots.
Here’s my simple setup:
Morning trigger pulls 3 random employee names from a database
System also picks a random story theme or movie style
Everything gets sent to an AI writing tool with instructions to create a short story
The finished story automatically posts to our dedicated fun channel
The whole thing took about half an hour to build using no-code automation tools. Just connected a few services together with webhooks and spreadsheets.
The results have been amazing. People who never participated in chat conversations are now commenting, adding emojis, and even writing their own sequel stories. Our workplace culture completely changed for the better.
Sure, it doesn’t boost our quarterly metrics, but seeing everyone laugh and connect like this makes me really happy.
What creative automations have you built? I’d love to hear about other unusual ways people are using technology!
Built something similar for our sales team - they get random customer profiles with bizarre requirements each morning. Like someone wanting our accounting software for their pet grooming business. They brainstorm solutions in a chat thread. Started as a joke but actually made them way better at problem-solving and product knowledge. Now when real customers have weird requests, they handle it easily. After explaining expense tracking for hamster grooming supplies, normal objections feel like nothing. Turns out ridiculous training methods work.
This reminds me of something we stumbled on at my old job. People started putting random movie quotes as meeting titles instead of actual names. Started as a joke but turned into this weird tradition - everyone would try guessing the movie during coffee breaks. The engagement was crazy - people who never talked suddenly had these animated discussions about random films. Sometimes the simplest stuff creates the most unexpected results. Your story generator hit that same sweet spot - that human need for shared experiences and inside jokes. People writing sequels means you nailed workplace culture. I’m totally stealing this for our team.
This is genius! We’ve done team building exercises before and nobody cared, but this would probably work way better. Our Slack is dead too - just work stuff and silence. I’m thinking of building something that gives people random superpowers each day. My coworkers would love seeing themselves as time travelers or whatever lol. Thanks for the inspiration!