Should Fun be Mandated at Work?

September 29, 2010

Fun activities in the workplace can often improve employee engagement. When these are mandated or poorly concocted, however, the fun can actually be counterproductive and reduce overall morale.

Some companies have used fun activities as a way to recruit new employees. It is used to increase customer engagement and even to help leverage social media opportunities. But is this fun really effective if it is mandated rather than grown more spontaneously?

Some examples of the fun activities I’m speaking of include:

  • TD Bank, the American arm of Canada’s Toronto Dominion, has a “Wow!” department that sends out teams in costumes to “surprise and delight” successful workers.
  • Google offers employees volleyball courts, roller hockey and bicycle paths to encourage hanging out longer in the workplace.
  • The London branch of Red Bull recently installed a slide in its office.
  • Acclaris, an IT company, has a “chief fun officer.”
  • Twitter claims one of its core values as creating “fun and a little weirdness.”
  • Zappos encourages workers to form noisy conga lines and then single out an individual colleague for praise, whereupon the person must wear a silly hat for a week.

What is it about fun that makes it necessary for employers to create it for us? Is this due to much of the younger workforce having had so many structured fun activities as children: heavily scheduled playdates by helicopter mothers, overly supervised slumber parties, too little downtime between extracurricular activities?

Encouraging employees to have fun while at work is all well and good, but this shouldn’t be a requirement. And what that fun looks like should not be decided by public relations or human resources departments in isolation of rank and file employees.

There are many ways employees can find more joy in their work. The most basic are not so much fun and games, as they are simply more supportive of the workers.

Fostering an environment where people feel empowered to do their best work should be executed long before efforts on creating fun. These can include such sensible things as:

Safe Environment – Ensure that every employee feels physically and emotionally safe to execute his or her job function. If employees are more concerned about their personal safety, they are not going to be able to enjoy any fun activities.

Open Communication – Provide the opportunity for every employee to feel free to speak with others throughout the organization. Keep an open door policy so that all ideas and concerns—both positive and not so positive can be heard.

Meaningful Values – Netflix includes nine behaviors and skills that they value in all employees: judgment, communication, impact, curiosity, innovation, courage, passion, honesty, selflessness. Working around people that embody these nine values would trump all fun activities for me.

Team Building – Provide opportunities where people can bond on topics outside the work they do. This can often be loads of fun with extremely powerful benefit of building trust and teamwork.

Advancement Opportunities – Ensure there is a career path for every employee so that expectations can be met and incentives exist to encourage moving up in the organization.

Flex Time – Perhaps the most fun employees can have is in first ensuring that their personal lives and families are taken into consideration. This could ultimately mean that an employee does not want to have fun at work if it means additional time away from his or her family.

These things will certainly help employees feel more joy in the workplace, which can result in higher employee engagement. They are also likely to improve productivity and that’s the kind of fun we could all use in this economy.

Motivating Employees in the 21st Century

April 5, 2010

Forget all the things you may currently believe about motivating employees. Cash incentives to stimulate productivity may work in the short term, but are ultimately not sustainable. Threats are also short lived because employee resentment brings about ill will and this is counterproductive in the long run.

Such carrot and stick approaches for improving performance simply are no longer effective and it’s time organizations move to a more radical approach.

In Daniel Pink’s insightful book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” he explores the question of what motivates people to do innovative work. Based on more than thirty years of research in behavioral science, he provides compelling evidence showing that monetary rewards can actually hinder creativity.

And as Pink relates in his speech at the TED Conference, when it comes to motivation, there is a huge gap between what science knows and what companies do.

Today, many companies more closely track knowledge workers hours at their desks rather than results produced. And, as I wrote about in a previous post, Results Only Work Environment or ROWE is one way to change this mentality.

Author Pink convincingly argues that once our basic need for financial stability is taken care of, the desire for intrinsic motivation kicks in. Intrinsic motivation is founded upon personal rewards (individual interest or love) rather than extrinsic motivation (money). In fact, many scientific studies have demonstrated that people actually become less motivated when money is tied to doing something we are already drawn to doing. It actually devalues it for us!

Further, Pink suggests it is necessary for both employees and employers to break free of this old “if-then” paradigm and replace it with “now-that” instead. Rather than hold out some reward or punishment in order to accomplish a goal, there should be an opportunity to tap into an employee’s own individual interest in meeting the goal.

“If tangible rewards are given unexpectedly to people after they have finished a task, the rewards are less likely to be detrimental to intrinsic motivation,” said Edward L. Deci, the University of Rochester psychology professor and author of “Intrinsic Motivation.”

The key to tapping into these intrinsic interests, according to Pink, is via autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Autonomy is about the urge to direct our lives. It means enabling employees to determine specifically what is entailed (task), when the work is done (time), how it gets done (technique), and with whom it is done (team). Autonomy requires management to step aside and give employees the opportunity to fully apply their creative selves.

Mastery is about the desire to get better at something that matters. It enables each of us to fully engage who we are in what we do. Only in this way are we likely to embrace the work we do as it transcends merely making a living and extends into making a life.

Purpose has to do with the yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves. It is the desire to leave the planet better than we found it. Purpose has to do with contributing to the greater good.

Writer and management consulant Peter Drucker stated “. . . once each knowledge worker has defined his or her own task and once the work has been appropriately restructured, each worker should be expected to work out his or her own course and to take responsibility for it.”

Enabling employees to tap into autonomy, mastery and purpose requires management giving up some control over how, when and where people work. It means the boss needs to incentivise people in ways that stimulate their desire to do good work. It means trusting that employees will choose to do the right thing for them as well as the organization.

These motivation techniques may not make sense for every workplace, but at a time of economic recession, global competitive pressures, corporate distrust, and low employee engagement, it makes sense to at least consider them wherever possible.

Mark Craemer  www.craemerconsulting.com

What is OD?

October 26, 2009

As someone who spent many years working in organizations—both for-profit and not-for-profit—I found the challenges with people far outweighed the challenges with technology. That is, it was the “who” that mattered more than the “how” or “what.” I came to believe that improving the interrelationships between human beings can go a long way towards increasing overall performance as well as better the workplace environment. This is a central reason for why I entered the field of organization development.

Last week here in Seattle I attended the annual OD Network Conference where more than 800 of us gathered to join and learn. It was exciting to be among such legendary OD professionals as Peter Block, Roger Harrison, Barry Oshry, Edgar Schein, Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff. It also got me thinking that, as a profession, we’ve been speaking primarily to ourselves rather than to the world at large. From my interactions with potential clients, the definition of organization development as well as its application is not widely understood. OD could certainly use a make-over to better define it in terms of benefits to the organization.

So what exactly is organization development? Quite simply, OD is a planned effort to increase an organization’s effectiveness and health. According to organizational consultant and author Warren Bennis, organization development is a complex strategy intended to change the beliefs, attitudes, values and structure of organizations so that they can better adapt to new technologies, markets and challenges. It can involve interventions in the organization’s processes, using behavioral science knowledge as well as organizational reflection, system improvement, planning and self-analysis.

From Kurt Lewin, widely recognized as the father of OD, came the ideas of “group dynamics” and “action research,” which are central to the basic OD process as well as the notion of a collaborative client/consultant relationship. OD is interdisciplinary in nature and draws on sociology, psychology, and theories of motivation, learning and personality. The OD consultant acts as a change agent with expertise in behavioral science and knows how to get people in an organization involved in solving their own problems.

Some specific contemporary examples of organization development efforts are team building, conflict negotiation, leadership development, change management, process improvement and more. These efforts can be implemented through process consulting, coaching, training, facilitation and other methods.

All organizations could benefit from organization development interventions because OD consultants use a systems perspective and help make processes more efficient, increase employee engagement, build better leaders and facilitate sustainable change initiatives. All of these interventions can directly effect the bottom line, but this may not be apparent in the short term.

I believe we OD professionals, both internal and external, could do our profession a great service by better measuring our efforts and then reporting the results more widely. Despite the fact that things such as group dynamics, employee engagement and improved leadership are difficult to measure, we should use both qualitative and quantitative methods to better justify these interventions and report them beyond the usual academic and OD professional communities. Only through this sustained effort will more potential clients be receptive to our work and actively seek it out to better their organizations.

Mark Craemer                               www.craemerconsulting.com