Fun at work can be an oxymoron to many people – I can remember my old school managers back in the day saying “if it were fun, it wouldn’t be work” or something like that. But these days, many people integrate work and life more than they try to balance it. Balance implies two distinct things, where integration is about creating a unified experience. A result of growing integration is that people want (and even expect) to have more fun at work. But what does that mean? The occassional ice cream social? Ping pong tables in the rec room? Free soda? For most employees, those are nice, but they don’t create a fun work environment. Fun seems to come from being engaged in the work in a meaninful way, not just from having distractions from the work.
Bob Reticker recently had a good post on Employee Engagement that talks about combining fun and functionality in the workplace – check it out: