Imagine opening the door to your office and finding this:
Another great way to play at work.
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Top 5 reasons we should play more at work
Jane works in HR in a large Danish organization where I was giving a speech about happiness at work. I talked to her in preparation for the speech to learn about their situation and challenges, and she told me the she and some co-workers wanted to do something fun for Halloween a few years back, so they carved pumpkins and put up decorations in hallways, meeting rooms, and offices.
The reaction from some co-workers was immediately dismissive and they were told in no uncertain terms that “this is a workplace, not a kindergarten.” They have not since attempted anything like that.
Pretty surprising considering Denmark was named the happiest country in the world in 2011 by a UN backed survey, right?
To most people, work and play are mutually exclusive. Work is serious, play is frivolous. Work is something you have to do, play is something you want to do. Work is hard, play is fun.
But does it really have to be that way? What would happen if we played more at work?
A while back, I asked the readers of this blog how they play at work and here are just a few examples.
Three great ways to play at work
How about introducing play into brainstorming:
When brainstorming for new ideas we wanted to exclude critical thinking and encourage divergent thinking. Rather than having a facilitator policing the workshops we introduced water pistols. Any mistimed critical thinking led to a soaking.
The pistols did not however become a distraction, they raised the energy levels massively and resulted in great, off the wall, ideas being proposed.
Even the house “Mr Negative” could not resist and started to come up with great ideas….after shooting himself several times as he realised that he was being negative before ideas had properly emerged.
Why not simply play a game on break time:
On Fridays, it’s not unusual for a game of darts to break out. We have a dart board in our office and it serves as a great way to take a break (a game usually lasts less than half an hour), build a little camaraderie, and get our minds off of work a bit. I have found that it’s a great team building activity and it actually makes work time more effective and productive.
Oh, and it’s fun, too.
One company even uses play in hiring:
Where I work, we do our best to weed out the unhappy and cynical employees before they even get hired.
After each candidate goes through his/her well-rehearsed and pre-meditated interviews with HR and management, the entire engineering team (it’s a small company) comes into the room, closes the door, and starts a game of Jenga like it’s no big deal. Meanwhile, we strike up a casual conversation with the candidate and insist he or she play with us.
Without fail, the candidates true colors are almost immediately revealed. Candidate scoffs at the idea of playing a game in an interview? Obviously too uptight for our group and not capable of handling rapidly changing situations. Focusing on Jenga also takes the candidate’s mind off of all of the pre-meditated answers and pages of ‘interview tips’ articles that we’ve all read at one point or another.
Works every time. We end up with engineers who are laid back and easygoing, but who know their stuff, and can think on their feet.
I have heard countless other great examples of workplaces making themselves more like playgrounds – and this is also good for business. Here are the top 5 reasons why it’s a good idea to mix work and play.
1: You relax and de-stress
A play-break is a great way to laugh and focus on something besides work, emails, meetings, deadlines and clients. That break gives us a chance to relax during an otherwise busy work day and makes us less stressed.
2: We build relationships
In play you can be yourself and so can your co-workers – as in the Jenga-hiring-game above that brought out an applicant’s true self. Playing, especially together is a great way to build better relationships with your co-workers.
3: It broadens your mind
Play stretches the mind and makes us more creative. More and better ideas come to you when you’re in a playful state of mind than when you’re being serious and professional.
4: We take work less seriously
To many people, work is life and death, forever locked in a bloodthirsty, winner-take-all battle to end. No surprise that this attitude tends to make people cramp up mentally. Introducing play in the workplace gives us a break from this mentality and a chance to take ourselves less seriously.
5: We become happier at work
But most of all, playing at work would serve to make a workplace happier – and we know from many studies, that a happy workplace is a profitable one!
The upshot
There is a great case to be made for playing way more at work. And what’s more, introducing play can be fun and easy. It’s not without its challenges, and as we saw from the example above, some workplaces have an anti-play brigade that insists on keeping any and all aspects of fun and playfulness far away from the workplace.
Well nuts to them, I say – let’s do it anyway! I suggest we make the new battle cry in the workplace ”Wanna play?”
Your take
How do you play at work? Does your workplace even allow that kind of thing? What would happen if you made work a little more like play? Write a comment, I’d love to hear your take.
Related posts
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How Google became such a great workplace – it’s all in the data
We’ve all seen how Google keeps coming out on top of the lists of the best US workplaces. I went to the Googleplex in Mountainview myself in 2011 to see if they really were that happy and they most certainly were.
But why is that? This fascinating article in Slate give us part of the answer. From the article:
A few years ago, Google’s human resources department noticed a problem: A lot of women were leaving the company… Google monitors its employees’ well-being to a degree that can seem absurd to those who work outside Mountain View. The attrition rate among women suggested there might be something amiss in the company’s happiness machine. And if there’s any sign that joy among Googlers is on the wane, it’s the Google HR department’s mission to figure out why and how to fix it.
Google calls its HR department People Operations, though most people in the firm shorten it to POPS.
Every company has an HR department who would be tasked with solving problems like this. Here’s where Google is different:
…when POPS looked into Google’s woman problem, it found it was really a new mother problem: Women who had recently given birth were leaving at twice Google’s average departure rate. At the time, Google offered an industry-standard maternity leave plan. After a woman gave birth, she got 12 weeks of paid time off.
…
So in 2007, they changed the plan. New mothers would now get five months off at full pay and full benefits, and they were allowed to split up that time however they wished, including taking some of that time off just before their due date.And it worked:
POPS rigorously monitors a slew of data about how employees respond to benefits, and it rarely throws money away. The five-month maternity leave plan, for instance, was a winner for the company. After it went into place, Google’s attrition rate for new mothers dropped down to the average rate for the rest of the firm. “A 50 percent reduction—it was enormous!” Bock says. What’s more, happiness—as measured by Googlegeist, a lengthy annual survey of employees—rose as well.
What’s radically different at Google is the data-driven approach they employ. Instead of making HR decisions by gut feel, they gather the data they need to find the right decision:
At the heart of POPS is a sophisticated employee-data tracking program, an effort to gain empirical certainty about every aspect of Google’s workers’ lives—not just the right level of pay and benefits but also such trivial-sounding details as the optimal size and shape of the cafeteria tables and the length of the lunch lines.
Read the whole article – there are many other great points in it.
Here’s just one more way they’ve done it:
Another major POPS finding concerned how to give an employee more money. In 2010, then-CEO Eric Schmidt decided to give all Googlers a raise. It was the job of POPS to determine the best way to offer that increase. The group ran a “conjoint survey” in which it asked employees to choose the best among many competing pay options. For instance, would you rather have $1,000 more in salary or $2,000 as a bonus?
“What we found was that they valued base pay above all. When we offered a bonus of X, they valued that at what it costs us. But if you give someone a dollar in base pay, they value it at more than a dollar because of the long-term certainty.” In the fall of 2010, Schmidt announced that all Google employees would get a 10 percent salary increase. Googlers were overjoyed—many people cite that announcement as their single happiest moment at the firm, and Googlegeist numbers that year went through the roof. Attrition to competing companies also declined.
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Fun with whiteboards
A creative challenge: Mix 80s songs and deserts.I got an email from Julie Dunbar at ABC-CLIO who wrote:
I’ve been inspired by your ideas for the past few months about bringing happiness into the workplace. Last week I discovered something that really brought joy into my office and I wanted to share it with you.
On the office whiteboard we wrote a theme–Day 1 was Literature and Food; Day 2 was Movies and Food; and Day 3 (Valentine’s Day) was 1980s Love Songs and Desserts (we like food).
Underneath the theme we wrote a few examples. Day 1: (Literature and Food) Tequila Mockingbird, Mansfield Pork, The Loin the Witch and the Wardrobe. Day 2: (Movies and Food) Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kidney Bean, Citizen Candy Kane, Silence of the Lambchops. Day 3: (80s songs and desserts) I Just Called to Say I Love Tiramisu, When Dove Bars Cry, and Why Can’t Pie be You.
By the end of each day, the white board was filled! By day 3, when I walked into the office, coworkers were already standing around the whiteboard and asked me, “Can we start?” One of them thanked me for bringing creativity in the office place!
Here are the full whiteboards for the other two themes:
But it doesn’t stop there. ABC-CLIO are spread over 2 offices and some people work from home. As Julie wrote in a follow-up email:
We all work together every day via phone and email, but we don’t actually know or have fun with one another. I thought it would be fun if we challenged the other colleagues outside of our Colorado office to this game – might help with building connection.
So we did this week and it was a success. The California office has already told me they will be counter-challenging us soon!
Here’s the email challenge:
This is a simple little thing you can do to introduce some fun in a workplace or between different locations of the same workplace. Could it work in your organization?
Also, what would be your contributions in the categories above? I have “Girls Just Wanna Have Flan” and “Field of Cream Puffs” :o)
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Have you ever received negative feedback at work in a very constructive way?
I was recently interviewed for this Forbes article on how to use negative feedback at work to your advantage.This got me thinking: How do you prefer to receive negative feedback at work? Can you think of a specific instance where someone criticised you in a way that was constructive and helpful? How did they do it? How did you react? Why did it work?
Or conversely, have you ever received negative feedback at work that was not at all helpful? What made it bad and how could it have been delivered better?
Please write a comment, I’d love to hear your story.
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Know any happy leaders or workplaces in South Africa?
I’ve been booked to do a number of speeches about happiness at work in South Africa in March. I’ll be in Johannesburg from March 3-6 and Cape Town from March 6-9.I’m currently working on a book of interviews with the world’s happiest leaders. These can be in business, arts, sports, politics, academia, etc.
Do you know of any South African leaders or workplaces who are obviously committed to creating happiness?
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Today’s lesson in Danish
If you’re wondering how the heck to pronounce “arbejdsglaede” (the Scandinavian word for happiness at work) you’re not alone:
Yeah, Danish is a horrible language.
Get the right pronunciation (and find out what arbejdsglaede means) at www.whattheheckisarbejdsglaede.com.
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Happiness tip: List 3 things that made you happy at work today
Sometimes the simplest things work the best, and this week’s happiness tips is one of the simplest we know:
Before you leave work, make a list of 3 things that made you happy at work today. It can be big things or small things, that doesn’t matter, just list 3 things that you enjoyed about work today.
It could be things like:
- We closed a big sale with a new client, that felt great
- A co-worker told me how much he appreciates working with me
- I had a great time at lunch with my team – everyone was laughing
We suggest making this list daily for a week and then switching to doing it only every Friday, where you list 3 things that made you happy that week. A study showed that making the list weekly rather than daily actually works better – possibly because you don’t tire of it as quickly.
This is one practice that seems almost too simple to work, but one study showed that if you do this for two weeks, you will be measurably happier for 3 months afterwards.
The reason why this works so well is probably that it helps us to actually remember the good things that happen to us during the work day. Normally our brains are subject to the phenomenon called negativity bias which means that we’re better at remembering bad experiences. If you’ve had 10 good experiences at work and one bad one, there’s a good chance that you’ll go home thinking about that one bad experience, which will make the day feel bad, though it was actually mostly a good day.
Pro tip: You can also apply the same tip at home. I’d just finished doing a speech for a client once, when a lady came up from the audience. She told me that she’d attended a speech of mine a few years earlier and that she’d implemented this tip with her family. Every evening around the dinner table, every person (herself, her husband and the two kids) have to list three things that made them happy that day. At first they found it to be a little weird, but now it’s something they all look forward to and she told me that her kids collect good experiences throughout the day that they can tell about at dinner.
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I’m doing tons of international speaking these days
I just wanted to brag for a second. Over the next few months, I’m booked for speaking gigs in:
- Sweden
- Norway
- South Africa
- Portugal
- UK (twice)
- Netherlands
- Bulgaria
- US (3 times)
- Chile
Woohoo!
Read more about our speaking offerings or book us to speak in your organization here.
