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.