A day doesn’t go passed without a company branding itself as “fun”. The buzzword is everywhere: It’s a fun work place, our employees have fun, the work is fun. In his editorial at The Economist, Shumpeter states that the benefits of fun as a corporate strategy – brush the image of the company and, more relevant to this course, enhance collaboration through team-building – are illusory.
The reasonable assumption is that if employees have fun in the company, it will set up a positive atmosphere for collaboration, innovation and productivity. A far-less reasonable assumption is to think that management can plan fun out and spread it top-down to the employees. Let’s say 80% of the employees will enjoy wearing cowboy hat (not my definition of fun) as employees do at Twitter. What about the other 20%? They will probably feel miserable having to do so.
Shumpeter points to a real problem: why do managers use artifacts to force fun instead of giving meaning, support and rewards to employees so they would enjoy their work and find it pleasant to collaborate? I don’t agree with the alternative – 60’s work environment. Managers should focus on what they can really do: make the work place enjoyable and collaborative, not fun.
2 replies on “Fun as a team-building strategy”
I just visited Google and IDEO today. INteresting how much they emphasize “fun.”
Morten
Interesting read, but I don’t know what the author is so riled up about. I don’t mean to say that forcefully incepted fun is a good thing, but rather what else is to be expected in a management system that wants their employees to want to come to work. After you read a paper like Power Play, its not a stretch to think that top level management will feel they can construct any social artifice to control their people.
But to the authors point, why fun though? Fun can certainly be a motivator for many, but is it the best? Work by Dan Pink on motivation will claim that people are driven to do good work by giving them autonomy, mastery, and purpose. I’ll just end with a link to an awesome hand drawn presentation with Dan Pink
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc