Let's Bring Fun Back to the Workplace!

Remember the water cooler? And how it felt to just bump into someone and chat about Netflix or your kid’s baseball game with no agenda? And everyone wore pants?

 

In the wise words of Joni Mitchell, sometimes “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

 

Working physically in an office came at a price for sure. It wasn’t all fun and games. But for many of us, that fun-and-games part is feeling absent. We’re working longer days (and weekends), we’re feeling the burn, and we’re missing a sense of fun. 

 

The pandemic may have changed the rules on what “fun” can look like right now. But there is still fun to be had. With or without a budget, there are ways you can start to bring it back into your workplace.

 

I recently ran a series of Listening Sessions for a client striving to understand what their employees want as far as fun in ‘21 and I learned some pretty great stuff I’m passing along today.

1. Fun means we’re all OK

When the pandemic began, many companies started trying to mandate fun by instituting weekly Zoom happy hours, awkward virtual team building events, and more.

 

But the truth is, it’s hard to lean into the pleasure of a happy hour when your brain is swimming in anxiety and overwhelm. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig—with all due respect to the pig.

 

These listening sessions taught me that teams are tired of feeling forced to laugh when they still feel like crying.

 

True fun begins with a foundation of everyone just being OK–having what they need as far as tools, resources, support, access to key benefits, etc.

 

Whether or not you’re in a position of leadership, if you’re looking to reinfuse a sense of fun back into your team, start by just checking in with people one-on-one. And maybe experiment with questions that invoke something deeper than “How are you?”

 

Here are some I’ve personally been asked and that I’ve appreciated:

• Are you looking for some thought partnership on anything right now?
• I’ve been working on X and I know you’ve been working on Y…wondering if we might compare notes and see if these projects might be complementary?
• Is there anything that’s been slowing...

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