mystarjob.com, Saturday 1 December 2012
It Pays to
Have
Fun
at Work
By ROSHAN THIRAN
[email protected]
Dispelling the
Myth that Fun
AND Work don’t
go together
I
N the late 90s, I was invited to a
debate between Herb Kelleher, CEO of
Southwestern Airlines and Jack Welch. I
became impressed with Herb Kelleher and
his usage of fun to drive productivity. No
whips or initiatives or forced compliance to the
cause but a simple and unorthodox philosophy of levity to drive productivity at his airline.
Southwest’s former CEO often rode to work on
his Harley and once settled a legal suit with an
arm–wrestling match. And on occasions, Kelleher
was known to dress up as Elvis Presley or a
bunny, just to keep his employees smiling and
happy. And smile they did, as Southwest built for
itself a reputation as the nation’s most profitable
airline, posting 2000 sales of nearly US$5.7bil
and a profit of US$603mil.
A few months later, I was given the responsibility to be the functional leader of a business.
When I began my assignment, I met my new
team and spent the first few days getting to
know them and understanding their working
styles. They were hard-working and a technically
talented team but there was low morale and
extremely poor productivity. Everyone worked
late hours but had minimal results. And everyone
disliked their work.
Herb Kelleher’s words on leveraging levity and
fun to drive productivity kept ringing in my mind
and even though it seemed illogical, I decided
to test out his philosophy with my new team.
Every quarter, we closed the department over the
weekend and had quarterly retreats where we
just had fun and started bonding as friends. We
started having team lunches together as often
as we could. We developed an after lunch “crazy
hour” ritual, where the team would do crazy
things – like have everyone wear a straw on their
shirt, or exercise together or just play practical
jokes on each other. We started weekly team
activities like Latin dancing or playing volleyball.
Just as Kelleher had done with Southwest, as
we had more fun together, interestingly,
productivity in my team increased
and our accomplishments began to
multiply exponentially. While many of
the other departments used to stare
at our “crazy” department initially, they
soon were craving to “hang-out’ with us and
join our quarterly retreat rituals. Fun, instead
of making us less productive, actually had the
opposite effect of increasing our effectiveness.
There are numerous reasons why fun is important in the workplace. Levity boosts our ability to
think outside the box and enables us to generate
innovative solutions necessary to solve problems.
Fun is a great creativity booster.
Research also indicates that while having fun,
we develop new neural cells in areas devoted to
learning and memory. Fun is also good for teaching. Gostick and Christopher wrote about how
learning in the classroom is enhanced by fun:
.. Humour also works in the classroom. In fact, college
students are more likely to recall a lecture when it
is sprinkled with jokes. Psychologist Randy Gardner’s
fascinating research showed that when levity about
relevant topics was injected into lectures, students
scored an amazing 15% higher on exams than their
non-humoured, bored-to-drooling peers.
Fun is a critical element in employee retention. Employee turnover can easily cost over
RM60,000 per person if you include severance
pay, exit interviews, hiring costs and lost productivity while training the new hire. Then add
the indirect costs like loss of intellectual capital,
decreased morale, increased employee stress
and negative reputation. A fun workplace is a
cure for employee turnover. I remember after my
department became a fun workplace, most of
my employees did not want to miss work. Not
only did they have friends at work, they did not
want to miss any fun “action” at work and they
definitely were not sending out their resumes
outside. Google, with its fun workplace, retains
about 95% of their employees.
People are naturally attracted to fun. A recent
survey of employees showed that humour displayed by their manager increases their loyalty
(retention) and productivity. Another survey
by Ipsos had employees rate their managers’
sense of humour, along with the likelihood of
them working in their current job a year from
the date of the survey. The results were striking!
They found that managers with better sense of
humour were more likely to retain employees.
So how do you make your workplace fun? Do
you think it’s something that only the MNCs
can afford? It really doesn’t have to cost you as
much as building Google’s extravagant facilities,
a fancy swimming pool or a rock climbing wall.
It can be something as simple as fortnightly
charades championships, breakfast potlucks or
making fun a KPI for all meetings. Just providing
an environment where people can lighten up is
all it requires.
At Leaderonomics, we have fun by our office
pranks. You can watch some of the pranks on
YouTube by searching for “Life at Leaderonomics”.
Too often fun doesn’t see the light of day,
because we sentence fun to the bottom of priority lists. “Business first, fun last,” is our mantra.
Taking our jobs seriously and ourselves lightly is
the key to making fun of work.
At my previous office, one person signs up
each day to blast a song daily in the afternoon
when everyone needs a break and people get
up and dance. The Lego company has scooters
for workers to ride around its business park. At
Southwestern Airlines, the crew have fun with
their passengers. At Hakia, employees express
themselves on blank canvases that hang on the
walls. At Leaderonomics, we unwind by having
fun contests amongst ourselves.
But what happens then if you’re not a “fun”
person by nature? Not to worry, like everything
else, it can be learnt.
We don’t need to suddenly become a fun person, because play is something that we enjoyed
unconsciously as a child. All we need to do is to
learn to give ourselves and others permission to
have fun. As leaders, we need to build enablers
for fun to thrive.
“You don’t have to have a team of comedy
writers,” says David Summers of the American
Management Association. “Managers just need
to give employees permission to be human, open
to giving and receiving humour at work.” And
therein is the secret to enabling fun to thrive in
your workplace – embracing fun yourself and
opening up your organisation to elements of fun,
even occasionally allowing yourself to be the
object of fun at the workplace.
A final thought – fun is important as it
attracts new customers. People are attracted to
organisations that are cool and fun. I recall a big
customer who ended up signing an exclusive
multi-million dollar deal with the company I was
at a few years ago. When I questioned him on
why he signed up even though our performance
was not near world-class, he replied quickly,
“Your organisation is fun and it’s contagious.
All your employees love their work and I bet in
a few years you will become world-class.” He
wasn’t wrong.
All being said, fun is a key tool to leverage in
these recessionary times. It improves communication, enhances creativity, builds trust and
friendships in the organisation and even has
health benefits. When people are having fun,
they are working harder, focused on your organisation, and are able to maintain their composure
in a crisis. If your organisation is ready to catapult into the next level of business success, fun
may just be your catalyst.
n Roshan Thiran is CEO of Leaderonomics, a social
enterprise focused on inspiring youth to leadership greatness. He hopes to see more fun and joy
at the workplace by inspiring folks to take fun
seriously. For ‘fun’ learning programmes, email
[email protected] for details.