This Week’s Moment: In Defense of Fun at Work
Back when we were more regularly in the office — pre pandemic and even a bit post-pandemic — I made it a habit to keep a bottle of bubbles on my office desk. No, I don’t mean a bottle of bubbly. I mean a bottle of actual-childhood-get-your-fingers-sticky-and-blow-some-bubbles bubbles. Why? Because bubbles are delightful. Because nothing was more unexpectedly delightful than your HR Director exiting her office and blowing a round full of bubbles over the desks in the middle of the day. It was ridiculous. I know that. But, I also gained a series of smiles every time I did it even on the moodiest of days. (it also came in handy on the days someone brought the kids into the office. Joy out the wazoo).
This idea of adding “moments of delight” into the office space wasn’t originally mine. (duh) In fact, you can see it in the trend of office space design strongly in the late 2000s and 2010s. Office spaces like WeWork, Facebook, Weiden & Kennedy, etc. all chose to include spaces of “delight” throughout their buildings that included colorful murals, light displays, plant walls, beanbags and the famously bashed ping-pong tables. Yes, we can agree a ping pong table didn’t make up for being overworked or underpaid. But you know what ping-pong tables are? Fun. They are fun. A concept that is increasingly missing in the even more modern, modern workplace. And maybe nearly absent in the remote-only workplace.
If you’ve been following along with the post-pandemic panic of what to do about offices, many of the articles over the past few years documenting the perspective of CEOs as to why to “return to the office” tend to make a lot of arguments for a loss of creativity, productivity, and the inability to “water cooler talk” or simply “turn to a coworker” to solve a problem. On the pro-remote employee side you see the argument that people feel more productive, and can maximize their time personally and professionally. However, the psychological statistics are telling us that our workforce is feeling more disconnected, lost, lonely, depressed, and unmotivated as ever. I think the irony here is that CEOs see the lack of “water cooler” talk as a negative for the overall creativity and productivity of a team, however, there is a lot less tolerance for remote-work public displays of the same frivolity over slack channels or zoom calls. Plus, the tolerance of employees for the next “virtual happy hour” is also lower than ever. Slack channels or meeting starters focused on the nonsense of topics such as “Who saw the Barbie movie this week” or “Can we talk about Lydia from Love is Blind?” happen a lot less frequently in the name of efficiency and time management when really it is these loose conversations that enhanced team cultures and ultimately their output pre-pandemic.
For the sake of this short reflection on a Million Little Moments I’m going to summarize this suggestion as “What to do about the loss of FUN.” The absence of the office space or ping pong table isn’t an all-together negative in an evolving definition of how we work, but there is a disturbing lack of replacements for, or attention to, the decreasing amount of FUN that can be found at work.And if it is being given attention, the vast majority of the effort is being delegated to your HR team to manufacture the fun. It’s honestly an unfair balance, and fun can’t be faked.
So, I suggest that as we head into the holiday season, where even the remote offices are finding moments to bring the whole team together, let’s make more choices to allow the breathing room for frivolity. This might look different team to team, or leader to leader, but give yourself the chance to muse on how you might return to the light hearted fun that was found in office spaces of years gone by this holiday season.
With one of my teams this is the return of secret Santa, an in person holiday party, the choice of a team building relay race over a more intense training session, and some sprinkling in of elements like bubbles. The moments don’t have to be huge. They just have to be fun.
