Off-site team-building sessions, company happy-hours, team lunches — these are all great for building team camaraderie. But rather than force or plan work-related get-togethers, the Development team at AP has discovered a far more efficient way to accomplish the same goal, and it comes in the form of a large bucket of nuts.

Absurd, but true. And here’s the proof:

•    Cracking nuts is active. Instead of sitting around a table with your co-workers staring off into space, you actually have to do something. If you're good at it, people will cheer you on. If you're not so good, they'll give you a hard time.
•    Sharing a nut-cracker encourages patience and family-like cooperation.
•    Eating nuts is actually healthy and (probably) increases worker productivity.
•    Many, many, many horrible jokes can be made while cracking and eating nuts.

Ridiculous? Yes. But we bought a whole bunch of nuts from an online nut retailer and it turned out that it had a positive impact on the Development team culture.