Importance of fun even at work

There was this friend of mine who, year after year, would get the highest scores in the employee opinion survey, and his team had the lowest attrition among all the teams in the organisation. And wait, the worse is yet to come. Every year, he would be well within his salary budgets and offer the lowest in terms of salary hikes and bonuses to his team. How the hell does he manage to do all that, we would wonder. Until one day I sat with him and asked him how he managed to do all of this.

That’s when he started spilling the beans. In his view, “business has to be fun.” This was an important factor for work and the success of his teams. According to him, creating an exciting work culture is the best way to motivate and retain good people. And surprise of surprises, you do n’t even have to pay them much to stay with you. They will do so on their own. He went on to add that this was a particularly useful asset if one does not have the reputation as a world class organisation, a visionary or a brilliant inventor to fall back on. Being clever is all very well, but ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’.

The conversation with him was no rocket science, but was an eye-opener nevertheless.

Why do people leave organisations? They don’t find the job challenging, are unhappy with their supervisor, think that they are paid less than what they deserve, are unhappy with their jobs, their careers. Don’t all of these point to one single factor — unhappiness at work, unhappiness about the job, career, pay, te am, supervisor and so on.

For a minute, just think of a person being happy at work, about someone who is having fun at work. Will he ever think of quitting? Will he ever think of leaving the team that he enjoys being a part of. Will he even contemplate divorcing an organisation that ma kes life exciting for him? Of course not! People will be willing to ignore small issues, overlook career challenges, not really be fussed up about work hours, and ensure timely delivery, provided they are happy about what they are

doing and are having fun at work.

The extreme importance of fun at work cannot be underestimated. It can have catastrophic consequences in organisations where it does not exist. What is this fun at wo rk? Does it mean just jumping around at the workplaces, pl aying some team games, for cibly putting people together and getting them to simulate a team, dance, music and so on? Is this what fun at work means? If you have worked long enough, you would realise that at best all this is a part of having fun at work.

Having fun at work means enjoying doing what you are doing while spending half yo ur life. After all, isn’t that the time you spend at work? This could be in the form of generic fun through all that I have outlined above. But all that stuff is short-lived, gives instant gratification to your ne ed to be pepped up.

For sustained long-term fun, one needs to feel good at work. One needs to be happy about what one is doing. And that comes through a feeling that what you are doing is toward a cause. What you are doing is important to the organisation and is going toward contributing to an overall organisational goal. And this is where the supervisor has a very important role to play.

In any organisation, in any team, you cannot have a unified approach to having fun at work. Perception of fun at work is different for different people. A good supervisor, if he is able to identify what turns on different employees and then adopts divergent approaches to these employees to ensure that they all feel good about being a part of his team, can easily ensure that employees stay with him.

Feel-good and fun at work is all about finding the right nerve to touch in every single employee and ensure that th ey get what they want. It’s not about money. It’s a combination of fun, rewards, recognition, thank yous and, most importantly, employees being a part of a common organisational goal and fe eling that th ey are an important consti tuent to achieving that goal.

If organisations reach this state of employee engageme nt and motivation, it might ju st put the recruitment consultants out of business.

The writer is a senior banker at HSBC. These are his personal views