S1E8 Employees Just Want To Have Fun

Welcome to Everything Is A People Problem; a podcast that explores the connections between business, culture, and community, uncovering how every business problem has a people-centric solution with host Dia Zafer-Joyce. 

In this episode, Dia explains how having fun in the workplace has a positive impact on engagement, creativity, and purpose.

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Hi there. Welcome to Everything is a People Problem, a podcast that explores the connections between business, culture, and community, uncovering how every business problem has a people centric solution. I'm your host, Dia Zafer-Joyce. Let's talk about people. 

Why hello. I'm Dia, and welcome back to Everything is a People Problem. Having fun at work is a non negotiable for me. I need to dedicate intentional time with my team to be joyful because if we just focus on the tasks and the roadmaps and the strategies, work is really dull.  Once a quarter, I try to organize either a team wide or org wide event that has some element of fun. Maybe employees are learning from each other or we bring someone in externally that can lead us in an activity. 

But one time I organized a game of Mafia and since we're in a hybrid space that means that it was pretty friendly to do this virtually.  If you've never played Mafia before, there's the narrator, who's the organizer, and they assign roles ahead of time before you play, and those roles are Mafia, so you're trying to kill people, civilians, who are innocent, the doctor, who tries to save people, and the investigator, who tries to identify Mafia members.  A leader is primed for this narrator role because you can draw people out. You can start to pit people against each other. Maybe plant seeds that there's some form of deception happening. Try to see who becomes allies and builds bonds together; usually it's the mafia that does that. But it is so fun to get a team in a room where they're also leveraging their strategy and negotiation skills, but in a way that's completely different than how we use them in a work environment. 

It's not easy to find time for these events. You have to, as a manager, be intentional about booking these activities and setting aside the time with a priority of fun. And I'm talking about this because guess what?  There's significant research that shows fun in the workplace has a positive impact on engagement, creativity, and purpose. In fact, when we find tasks more enjoyable, we're more likely and more eager to dig into them and complete them.  

Mario Tamayo, author of the book, “Work Made Fun Gets Done,” conducted a voluntary study where employees and companies could participate in a 60 statement survey and it had a five point scale that described what a great employee experience looks like or assessed what it could look like. And they measured that experience in terms of high levels of trust, respect, credibility, fairness, pride, and camaraderie.  His book focused on the subset of companies that employees tagged as “great,” so 81 percent of those employees described their work environment as fun. So, a fun work environment gave them a great company to work for.

Now, if you've listened to a few episodes of this podcast, you would probably put together that a great company is creating engaged employees and the higher the engagement, the more successful the business. Having fun at work has a lot of benefits, but three of my favorites are that it increases risk taking, it reduces stress levels, and it improves teamwork. 

Regina Mayer, the global head of energy for KPGM, conducted a women's leadership study and she found that 45 percent of women surveyed in this study said risk taking allowed them to gain a whole new set of skills that they otherwise would have never developed.  I think her story is really interesting because she was in the army and had attended airborne school, or jump school, which trains you how to parachute into an operation from an aircraft. And she was only one of 15 women in a class of 500 who had signed up to jump. And she said that when they went up into their aircrafts for their very first jumps, they were each in different teams, but each woman was in a team comprised entirely of men. And in her group, she jumped first. Later, she learned that most of the other women had also jumped first. The reward in this for her, besides all those women being badasses, and her included, is that she earned incredible respect among her peers, and that was an example of her leading from the front. And sure, maybe she would have gained respect from her peers in a different activity or exercise, but this was the one where she took a risk, and that risk really paid off. She took this risk because she felt safe, and that's where we come back to having fun in the workplace, because one of the ways to build safety and a culture safety is to have fun. 

You know you're in a great work environment when you can laugh and laughter is a stress reliever. A hearty laugh relieves your physical tension and you stay relaxed for up to 45 minutes after the laugh has occurred. The Mayo Clinic found, along with many other  institutions, but I'm going to focus on the Mayo Clinic's research, that laughter improves your immune system. Negative thoughts manifest into these chemical reactions that bring more stress into your system and ultimately decrease your immunity. But in contrast, positive thoughts and laughter, which generates positivity, releases neuropeptides that help fight stress and potentially more serious illnesses. Bright HR worked with the Robertson Cooper Consultants on their It Pays to Play study, which focused on 2, 000 employees from all over the UK identifying correlations between workplace fun and business results. They found that 62 percent of employees who had no sick days in the last 3 months experienced some form of fun in the workplace.

Friendly reminder, this is just a study, and a study of a finite number of people, so, I fully believe if someone is sick, you are sick, you should take your time off to be sick. It doesn't mean you're not having enough fun in the workplace, but their survey did also identify that employees who feel stressed are more likely to have sickness absences. There's no denying that if you're laughing and having fun at work, it becomes an environment you choose to be in. And even though you don't get to necessarily choose your coworkers, if you're having fun with them, then working as a team gets way easier. 

I know I'm throwing a lot of statistics at you during this episode, so also prepare your heart for some more, but I'm doing that because not only am I passionate about having fun at work and it's foundational to my own leadership, I really want you to understand how having fun is not a waste of time. Here are the statistics  because we're talking about teamwork and Stanford University conducted a study that showed teams that work well together are 50 percent more productive. It shows that effective teamwork is directly linked to increased productivity, and when team members collaborate, they can accomplish more tasks and projects in less time. 

Listen, if you're not going to have fun for the reasons that I think it's important to have fun, then at the very least, you should prioritize an engaging environment to attract and retain talent.  In that same Bright HR study I talked about earlier, they found that 79 percent of graduates believe that a fun work environment is essential to their employment. So if you're asked in an interview, how do you have fun at work and you don't have a good answer, there's a pretty high likelihood that that incredible talent you've just talked to is not going to choose to work at your company. And you know who suffers at that point? Your bottom line.  

Real talk.  What if you're not a fun person? I am sad for you if that's true, but it can be difficult to know how to incorporate fun into the workplace. And fun is a spectrum because of course we need to be thoughtful and intentional about what does fun mean. How do we define it, and how do we make it inclusive. There are a lot of resources online for ways to have fun, both in person and in hybrid environments, and so I'm going to encourage you to do some research for ideas. You already had mine through virtual mafia. Another time, instead of eating lunch at the cafeteria, an employee and I walked 10 minutes down the streetto go get a bite and visit a plant shop. And then we came back with plants, one of which she let brilliantly die on her desk over the course of a weekend. And so we had a good laugh about that the next week. But the one thing I am going to ask you to do is talk to your team. I talk a lot about vulnerability and honesty and how that is also foundational to a healthy culture, so if you want to have fun with your team, tell them you want to have fun with them be honest and say, “Hey I'm not sure what everybody thinks is fun, so can I get some ideas?” or take a poll ask them through an anonymous survey so that you can get ideas from them, but not necessarily put them on the spot. But your best resource is going to be your team. And if you're an employee and your manager hasn't set aside intentional time for fun, number one, share this podcast episode. Number two, ask for it. It's great if managers have access to an employee morale budget, but you also don't need money to have a good time. So this is not only something you want as an employee, this is something you need. And it is your responsibility as an employee to tell your manager what you need in order to be successful. 

I want to leave you with this article that I found when I was researching fun in the workplace. It's from March of 2022, and let me read you the title. “The highest French court ruled that a Paris based consultant was wrongfully fired after he refused to stick to the ‘fun values’ of the company.”  In 2015, Mr.T, as he's referred to in the court documents to protect his identity, was fired from Cubik Partners for “professional deficiency.” So basically he didn't stick to the, “fun and professional” values of the company, which involved both seminars, that's the professional part, and after work drinks, the fun part. The court ruled in Mr. T's favor, saying that he was exercising his freedom of opinion and expression, especially since this investigation brought out the excessive alcohol consumption and promotion of promiscuity, bullying, and misconduct from the company itself.  

There's a couple things to take away from here. Number one, Mr. T absolutely did the right thing. He should not have put himself in a situation where he felt unsafe. So when we talk about fun in the workplace, the number one goal is safety. In fact, the fun is trying to cultivate an environment where people feel safe to experiment, to be their best selves. So, if you're inviting people into an unsafe environment with the guise of it being fun,  that's the wrong move. The other thing is with the reintroduction of in-person work and attendance, it has reintroduced social engagements that are also in person. There is a natural push and pull between professional duty and personal autonomy. You need to find the right balance for you between building the relationships that are critical to your career and your growth, as well as exercising what you need for yourself. 

When you are a people first manager, you'll probably check in with your team first and ask for those who are comfortable to participate, while also making it guilt-free for those who simply can't. I know what you're thinking. You're watching the clock click down on this podcast episode and you're thinking, “But Dia, don't go! I've got so many more questions for you!” Thankfully, I have a solution for you. If you navigate to diazaferjoyce.com/podcast, you have an ability to submit a question. It says, “Do you have a question for the pod?” And then the link that says click here will automatically open an email with a quick form, which is your name, which is optional, and your question, and you have the ability to attach a voice recording so that that way I can play you on the air. We're on episode eight right now and for season one I committed to 16 episodes and I've dedicated the 16th entirely to Q& A. So I'm starting to collect those now. If you've got a question, if you want advice, please feel free to submit it through the website and I can't wait to be able to address it together.

You've just finished the latest installment of everything is A People Problem. You can find episode transcripts with work cited on diazaferjoyce.com/podcast. Find me on Instagram @EverythingIsAPeopleProblem, and tell me what you thought of the episode.  If you like what you heard, please subscribe so that you're notified when new weekly episodes become available. Once again, I'm your host, Dia Zafer-Joyce, thanks for joining me and see you next week.

Today’s episode was written and produced by Dia Zafer-Joyce. It featured insights and statistics from Bright HR, Euronews, Harvard Business Review, HelpGuide.org, KPMG, the Mayo Clinic, Teambuilding.com, vantage Circle, and Zight, and Royalty-free music provided by Sarah, the Instrumentalist from Epidemic Sound.