Fun at Work??
Several of us just returned from the Charlotte Business Journal’s 2009 Best Places to Work awards event. The event is an annual opportunity for employers (small, medium, and large) to be recognized for their local employee’s engagement level.
Every year, the Business Journal sends out surveys (50,000 this year) to employees in the area to rate their employers on leadership, culture, and rewards, among other things. The top-rated employers are invited to bring employees to the luncheon, receive recognition in front of their peers, and, obviously, promote their “Best Employer” status to customers, clients, recruits, and existing employees.
Immediately preceding each employer award presentation, the announcer provides a little blurb about the company. Given that there were 25 small companies, 25 medium companies, and 15 large companies recognized, it is not surprising that you start to hear a lot of the same things:
- “Employees are our most important asset.”
- “Happy employees make happy customers.”
- “Community service is a cornerstone of our company.”
- “We are a family oriented company.”
- “We hire the best and set them free.”
- “We reward our employees for their success.”
I think you get the picture, but one thing that we hear a lot nowadays is “fun”. As in:
- “We believe in having fun.”
- “We have office parties every Friday.”
- “We play games at work.”
- “We celebrate together.”
It really gets me to thinking, “Can you really make fun part of your organizational strategy?” I get it if the company is in a more “creative” industry: architecture, advertising, PR and the like, but some of the companies that won awards, and talked about fun are in pretty staid, and/or serious industries and professions: accounting, law, medicine, etc.
I once worked for a large consulting firm that decided to plan for fun by adding colored fonts to emails and adding fun as a line-item on practice-wide conference calls. I didn’t really find that too much fun, but it did allow HR to say, “Our business groups know that fun is important, and our managers are focused on making sure that it’s a part of every day operation.”
I don’t think that’s how it works.
When I’ve seen fun happen, it’s more informal and more likely focused on people who are comfortable with each other – colleagues. The guy who’s always running around telling inappropriate jokes sure doesn’t add to a lot of peoples “fun”, but neither does the blue font with the fireworks symbol at the top of your managers’ email signature.
What do you think? Can you plan for fun at work? Should you? Or should you just keep your eyes and ears open, and if you can tell that everybody is miserable, you KNOW that you have a problem.