Embrace Your Inner Work Clown
Tomorrow at 10 a.m., report to the staff meeting room for one hour of fun.
Sounds preposterous, no? Actually, this is not far from what is happening in many organizations desperate to boost employee engagement. There are ‘wacky Fridays’, karaoke competitions, laughter workshops, and countless variations on the theme. Here is the equation: organized and packaged fun means happy employees means more satisfied, creative, motivated employees means increased corporate performance. But can you actually connect the paint dots from increased fun to increased productivity?
Writing in a special “fun” issue of the journal Employee Relations, Sharon C. Bolton (Strathclyde U Business School, Glasgow) and Maeve Houlihan (University College Dublin) take a critical view. They say that for a great many employees, enforced fun is like enforced pain and that there is very little proof that such initiatives actually make for more engaged staff.
In the past, sociologists identified laughter and game playing in the workplace as either a way to tame the “beast of boredom” or to subversively make fun of management. In turn managers have been portrayed as seeing such hijinks as a disruptive influence that needed to be discouraged.
How far we’ve come. Now it’s the manager instigating the games and the employee who is cluck-clucking. “The informal rules of workplace fun appear to have been repackaged on management’s terms with the express purpose of furthering organisational goals,” Bolton and Houlihan write. “Put simply, ‘fun is not frivolous anymore.’”
The authors have identified “shades of engagement” as people enjoy, endure, or escape organizational-sponsored game playing.
According to Bolton and Houlihan, “Official fun has some striking features in the way it presumes that fun will be on managerial terms and that there will be benefits for all; in the way it excludes those who are unable (or choose not) to party all weekend; in the way it imposes formal reward mechanisms, and it demands macho work-hard, play-hard rules; and, in the process, it often reinforces unreconstructed stereotypes around what is considered fun and who may be made fun of; and it confuses as the boundaries around what is and is not sanctioned continually shift.”
The authors argue for more research in the area. I say, bring on the bongos.
“Are we having fun yet? A consideration of workplace fun and engagement,” by Sharon C. Bolton and Maeve Houlihan; Employee Relations (Vol. 31 No. 6, 2009; pp. 556-568)
If you cannot find this journal is your local library, email me for a copy of the article at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com
photo credit: Troy McClure SF