“Fun not only works but is essential for healthy companies. It's not about doing funny things but being fun, something Leslie Yerkes has made perfectly clear in this very readable book.”
— Lena Andersson OD Consultant Lindingö, Sweden
“As a member of the board of the nonprofit organization I direct, Leslie practices what she writes about. She makes the work of the board much more interesting. Her book contains simple steps you can take to bring your whole self to work and grant permission to others to do the same.”
— John Colm President and Executive Director, WIRE-net Cleveland OH
“Leslie Yerkes' new book chronicles high-performing companies that create positive work cultures that drive out fear, increase risk-taking, strengthen trust, and encourage success. If you want your work to be like this, read this book. I loved it.”
— Dorothy Marcic Dr. Dorothy Productions Author of Respect the Musical Nashville TN
“ Sometimes, we forget that work is supposed to be fun. Leslie's book reminds us how to return to the fun we have within us in a way that is good for business and good for our spiritual and financial health.”
— Mark Albion Author of the New York Times bestseller Making a Life, Making a Living Denver CO
“Fun Works should be taken seriously by any organization committed to success. It gives businesses compelling reasons to ask: ‘How can having fun at work energize our productiv- ity and profitability?' I'm giving this book to one of my clients.”
— Marilee Adams, PhD Author of Change Your Questions, Change Your Life Lambertville NJ
“I used to wonder how a financial-related business could emphasize fun. After reading Fun Works, I realized that fun does not necessarily mean silly or boisterous. I may not be able to express fun in all the ways shown here, but I do believe the workplace can be a place where it is fun to be and that work can be fun, too. I will consciously try to put into practices the principles of Fun/Work Fusion.”
— Donald G. Hart President, United Church Foundation New York NY
“It's not easy to get everyone at work on the same page. When it happens, it's powerful. Leslie's stories illustrate that fun can do just that. Fun does indeed work.”
— Steve Peplin President, Talan Products Cleveland OH
“Leslie's book makes you realize that when fun permeates the environment of an organiza- tion, it is irresistible, contagious, and automatic. When a company feels like a family, when you laugh, cry, and have fun together, retention is higher and growth is stronger and faster. But the smiles around the office on any given day are really the truest measurement.”
— Debbie Donley Principal, Vocon Cleveland OH
“Fun Works creates the desire to encourage fun in any workplace. Leslie suggests that fun is not something bolted on as an afterthought, that fun at works comes only when fun is incorporated into your fundamental, everyday business processes. To every leader who wants a staff that looks forward to coming to work each and every day, I recommend Fun Works. To read and know Leslie Yerkes is to know that fun is always just around the corner and that without knowing it's happening, Leslie will pull you around the corner with her!”
— Bret Brentall, Jr. President, Raritan Engineering Millvale NJ
The Case for Integrating Fun and Work
Anyone who's worked with contractors on a building project has a story; usually it's a horror story. Contractors, these stories go, are a real pain. They tell you one thing and do another; they substitute materials; they move tradespeople arbitrarily from one job to another so there's no continuity on your project. In short, working with contractors is not fun. Or so the stories go.
My experience, however, is 180° different. My contractor story is a fun one and the payoff, the final product, is award-winning. And it's different because in my story the contractors had fun at work.
It took me two years to find the right space for my new office. For the first five years of my business, I worked from my home (like many entrepreneurs) creating a very successful and profitable change-management consulting practice. Now I wanted to have my own, separate office space — a space in which I could have employees and clients and fun.
My requirements for this space included being downtown on the ground floor with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on trees — not an easy task in Cleveland, Ohio. But I persevered. The space I eventually found was connected to a city park and had the windows I needed. Inside the space, however, were rooms and walls and doors. Because of the kind of the business I'm in, one that places high value on the free flow of ideas and information, I wanted a special space that would embody those principles. To me, that meant it had to have no rooms, no offices, no head-of-the-table, no hierarchy.
Fortunately, Bill Mason, the architect who was assigned to me by the building owner, understood my ideas and was able to develop my vision into a physical reality. The successful birth of my new office space depended on the creation of a good plan, and the plan that Bill created was perfect. All we needed to be successful now was a good midwife. We needed a contractor.
Because this was my first ‘real' office space, and because it was a unique, non-traditional design, and because I'm a naturally involved and enthusiastic person (some even call me a Hokey-Pokey Person but that's another story), I visited the site twice daily; once in the morning to ask the contractor and tradespeople what was planned for the day, and once in the evening to check on the progress. Because my work with clients deals constantly with organizational 4development, I was acutely aware that everyone works better when someone's interested in what they're doing and when they're praised for their performance and their results. I was prepared to provide that.
At the end of one working day, as the space changed from wires and nails and dust into something that began to resemble the dream I had in my head of my new work home, I found myself really excited with the day's results. I was filled with exuberance and sudden, uncontrollable energy and, like some character from a Jules Fieffer cartoon, I decided to do ‘A Dance of Done Well.' But instead of just performing this impromptu jig by myself I asked the three contractors present to join me. And somewhat to my surprise, they did.
Visualize one blonde lady in a dress, a man wearing paint-spattered bib overalls, and two men in jeans with tool belts around their waists holding hands and dancing in a circle. You now have a picture of ‘The Dance of Done Well.'
Over the course of the next several weeks, this impromptu experience developed into a ritual. In the mornings, I would meet with the craftsmen onsite and discuss what they were going to accomplish that day; in the evenings we would celebrate their accomplishments with a dance. If the day's project was drywall, for example, in the evening we celebrated with ‘The Dance of Drywall Done Well.' The days that followed became a lot of fun for everyone involved. The work of the day was enthusiastically anticipated by each tradesman and results were at the highest level of accomplishment. Because of these daily dances, each individual contractor and craftsman strove to do their best work — work that would be worthy of a dance of celebration. The space was becoming my dream.
Finally, the office was completed enough for me to move in but, as in many building experiences, there were still a few last-minute details to be handled. On this particular day, two seasoned and highly conservative electricians showed up to install the gallery-style lighting for the sculpture that was commissioned for our office. I explained to them why the sculpture was important to me and our company, what it represented, and how I envisioned this work of art affecting the clients who came into our space. The two men understood and declared that they'd give the project their utmost attention, and then they said to me, “You aren't going to make us dance, are you?”
I was amazed. In the contracting community in Cleveland, I had apparently become known as ‘the lady who makes you dance.' I smiled and laughed and told them I wouldn't make them dance but asked them if it was okay if I got excited when they were done. They allowed as that would be all right and went to work.
By noon they had finished and I inspected their work and they showed me how the switches worked and how to change the bulbs when they burned out, no easy task in a space with 14-foot ceilings! I thanked them profusely and shook their hands. This was the point at which I expected them to leave. They had performed their best work and they had been praised for it. All the structures and requirements of the work relationship had apparently been fulfilled. Instead, they stood at the door, silent and expectant, looking alternately at their work and at 5me. After several seconds of this waiting, one of them looked me in the eye and said, “Aren't you going to ask us to dance?”
I had discovered an essential truth about what makes work valuable: Work Needs Fun. If there isn't fun in work, if there isn't enjoyment, work doesn't mean as much to the workers.
So, what did we do? We danced.
THE FUSION OF WORK AND FUN we experienced while building my new office space created a working relationship which all the members of the process valued highly. Not only was it a peak experience for the individuals involved, but the outcome of our work created a peak result: the space was gorgeous. The reality exceeded my dreams. Together, we had created something greater than the sum of its parts. The fusion of fun and work also has bottom-line value: our office space was awarded the AIA Ohio Design Award of Honor and the IBD-CID Award of Merit. To my way of thinking, these awards are the visible, tangible, outside confirmation that fun works. And it works well!
My new space also allowed me to attract and retain employees and clients whose values were in alignment with mine. Because my workspace so perfectly represented my energy and values, people who entered it for the first time would immediately feel comfortable and energized themselves — or they wouldn't! Either way, I now had a first-line screening tool to help me select people who would best improve my business.
My contractor story is one example of how when fun and work are successfully integrated both the process and the resultant product are improved.
IF WORK AND FUN ARE BEST WHEN integrated, how did we get to the current state where the common perception is that fun is an add-on? That the only time we are allowed to have fun is after work is over; that the only way we can have fun is to earn it through hard work? Work hasn't always been perceived in this way; work and the perception of work have changed and evolved. As you can see from The Timeline of Work Attitudes, work has evolved from Aristotle's ‘work is for slaves' to Calvin's ‘work is a commandment;' from ‘work is a virtue' to ‘work is who I am.'
We adopt the attitude toward work that our parents taught us; or we assimilate the attitude currently held by the strongest influence: our peer group or our employer. For many of us, work has become who we are. It is how we define ourselves. Unfortunately, that often means that work is life without fun, without friends, without family. In The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work, Joanne B. Ciulla says “…work sometimes substitutes for the fulfillment we used to derive from family, friends, religion, and community…. One of the first things Americans do when they meet someone new is say, ‘What do you do for a living?'”
Regardless of where society happens to be on the work-life timeline, it is possible to intentionally adopt individual elements into the current prevailing attitudes. Specifically, it is possible to reintegrate fun into our work. I say reintegrate because for long periods of time fun and
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8work co-existed. During the agricultural age, for example, work songs helped turn dreary tasks and repetitive actions into activities that, if not fun, at least contained an element of anticipation and comfort. If they had to work, at least they could sing while they did it. Barn raisings were changed from a task impossible for one or two people into a picnic-style community event during which barns seemed to be born full-grown in a single day. The element of fun turned an impossible task into an anticipated one, one at which friends, family, and neighbors worked side by side for the common good, caught up on old times, and shared food with one another. Vestiges of this behavior can be seen today when groups of people get together on a Saturday to clean up a ball diamond, paint a senior citizen's house, or build a playground. Throughout history, there are many such examples of the integration of ‘fun' with activities replete with the most boring and worst imaginable elements of work.
When the United States of America broke away from the Old World, Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers put these words into The Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. That among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” During the last 150 years of industrial work behavior, the element of fun began to be isolated from work and treated as a discrete, separate, and segregated concept and activity. We had decreed fun to be separate from work. We had made fun at work taboo. Apparently, we no longer had the unalienable right to enjoy work while we pursued Happiness.
“Love and work are
the cornerstones of
our humanness.”
SIGMUND FREUD
Today the concept of work is again in the midst of change. We are beginning to rediscover that fun belongs with work. It is my premise that fun and work naturally go together. That fun works and that work pays off better when it is fun. That for us to go forward, we need to unlearn 150 years worth of taboos about fun and work.
The integration of fun and work isn't about what you do, it's about who you're being when you're doing your work. Fun isn't the prize — it's the work. The enjoyment that comes with Cracker Jack® isn't simply the prize. The fun of Cracker Jack® is the process of finding the prize while you're eating the caramel corn and peanuts. If the fun were only the prize, that's all that would be in the box! But it isn't. Without the process, without the work, the prize would be meaningless. Enjoyment is a result of the integration of fun and work, of the Fun/Work Fusion.
When fun is integrated with work instead of segmented from work, the resultant fusion creates energy; it cements relationships between co-workers and between workers and the company. When fun is integrated into work, it fosters creativity and results in improved performance. Over the years, companies have worked hard at improving things like their customer service and at improving their quality. Many dozens, if not hundreds, of books have been 9written and published on these two very important elements of successful business. What has been overlooked is the inestimable value of fun in work.
IN MY EFFORTS TO UNDERSTAND THE importance of the Fun/Work Fusion, I have formulated eleven principles for integrating fun and work. Principles which, if applied to your work, to your work relationships and to your company or business, will unleash creativity, foster good morale, and promote individual effectiveness.
In the creation of Fun Works, we researched companies whose behavior, attitudes, and systems illustrate the validity of these principles and also support the integration of fun and work with regard to each principle. Although I found dozens of companies who qualified, I chose to feature the ones that best represented each of the eleven specific Principles of Fun/ Work Fusion. I spent months traveling to each company, interviewing key staff members, walking the facility, and witnessing the company at work. I took pictures and gathered collateral material. And I observed how each company embodied the principles of fun at work and determined which one they illustrated best. Their stories are located in Part Two: The Principles of Fun/Work Fusion.
Following are those principles, a brief explanation of each one, and a description of how that principle is represented by its case company.
PRINCIPLE ONE: GIVE PERMISSION TO PERFORM
Allow individuals to bring the best of their whole self to work each day. This principle requires a superb leader if it is to be effective. Leadership is essential to organizational well being. The leader creates the vision; the leader sets the tone for the journey; the leader holds the value that only by integrating fun and work can the best results be achieved. John Yokoyama, owner of Pike Place Fish in Seattle, Washington, World Famous home of the flying fish, believes play is the most important tenet. Employees interact with customers using play; they toss fish, they tell jokes, they dance with the customers. And when the play is done, Pike Place Fish has created employees who visit the fish market on their day off and customers who have committed to being customers for life.
PRINCIPLE TWO: CHALLENGE YOUR BIAS
Remove self-imposed obstacles to the release of your full being. We spend more time at work than any other single place, yet our biases prevent us from enjoying that time to its fullest. Our belief that ‘when the work is done we can have some fun' may be the strongest obstacle we face to integrating fun in the workplace. Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) actively encourages its employees to enjoy their work, to interact with Harvard students, and to think beyond the box. When new systems threatened old habits and comfort levels, HUDS encouraged its employees to consider the students first and do what was best for them — not necessarily what was best for themselves.
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PRINCIPLE THREE: CAPITALIZE ON THE SPONTANEOUS
This is not a program but a philosophy. Fun doesn't necessarily happen on schedule; it grows in a culture that fosters its existence. Southwest Airlines (known for irreverent flight attendants, unassigned seats, and low fares) is a culture in which fun grows easily and quickly. And it generates profits, as well. The Southwest Philosophy is to hire nice people and create a working environment that is fun. They succeed.
PRINCIPLE FOUR: TRUST THE PROCESS
You can't muscle energy. A laugh that is forced is not a true laugh. Americans are experts at task orientation: we thrive on to-do lists. We need help, however, with process orientation: we need to trust our people and trust the process and then stand out of the way. Employease is an Internet Business Application Service Provider that offers web-based Human Resource services to a wide variety of companies. Their philosophy is: ‘Successful management requires a lack of ego. Surround yourself with good people because it has a snowball effect. Good people give off more energy than they consume.' Employease has created a process that its employees love and follow with outstanding results.
PRINCIPLE FIVE: VALUE A DIVERSITY OF FUN STYLES
We don't all do it the same way. There is no right or wrong way to engage in serious fun. Be inclusive and share your fun energy with all constituents inside and outside of your organization. Blackboard, Inc., is a Washington DC based provider of Internet access for schools and their students, a place where both assignments and grades are posted for individual access by each student and each instructor. The wide variety of employees at Blackboard, Inc. has given rise to a wide variety of expressions of fun. Their philosophy is that work is hard but it's fun; that fun should exist before, during, and after work; that if work weren't fun, they wouldn't be doing it.
PRINCIPLE SIX: EXPAND THE BOUNDARIES
Don't start making rules to limit the process. The ideal balance of fun and work is only achieved when all individuals involved understand the boundaries of the playing field. At Process Creative Studios, an architectural firm in Cleveland, Ohio, the boundaries they have established along with the boundaries they have eliminated allow them to create award-winning designs, play a customer's original-music blues CD as their telephone on-hold music, and incorporate three large dogs into their daily in-office work lives.
PRINCIPLE SEVEN: BE AUTHENTIC
Where do you begin? All that is required is willingness: if you want to share this part of yourself with others, the opportunity will arise. To truly understand how work and fun integrate is to accept that it is a ‘being' state, not a ‘doing' state. Isle of Capri Casinos, Inc., one of 11the darlings of Wall Street, is a gaming industry leader in preferred-customer-marketing. Their ‘Isle Style' attitude is not a veneer that's applied to a new employee, it's an internal quality that's naturally exhibited. Isle of Capri searches out authentic people who enjoy life and enjoy being around people, and then trains them in specific job skills after they've been hired.
PRINCIPLE EIGHT: BE CHOICEFUL
Embrace the whole person. To be choiceful means to give yourself permission. True fun is not something you choose to do, it is something you choose to be. Fun is deciding to bring the best of your whole self to work every day. Russell-Rogat was a Cleveland-based outplacement firm that valued ‘Family First' and ‘If it isn't fun we're out of here.' Success with the outplacement for the Panama Canal attracted the attention of Lee Hecht Harrison, a national outplacement firm highly respected in the industry. Because their cultures and values matched, they chose to merge. Their choices were appropriately rewarded.
PRINCIPLE NINE: HIRE GOOD PEOPLE AND GET OUT OF THEIR WAY
If you trust your employees with your organization's most valuable assets, why not trust them to use their judgment on bringing fun to their work? When the fun is ‘in' the work and results from the satisfaction of good work and working relationships, then there is little risk of ‘when the cat's away the mice will play.' One Prudential Exchange, a team of Prudential employees charged with the creation of a new culture for the insurance giant, was successful because Prudential hired for the team people who had passion for their work, confidence in their abilities, and the willingness to be vulnerable. And then they created an environment in which these people felt safe to say what was on their mind and lead the company to the achievement of their goals.
PRINCIPLE TEN: EMBRACE EXPANSIVE THINKING AND RISK TAKING
A culture that learns how to harness and develop the full potential of its employees is a culture that is comfortable with risk taking and expansive thinking. To be successful at risk taking, we must overcome our fear of failure. Will Vinton Studios, creator of the California Raisins and the M&M's commercials, believes in ‘…the value of taking risks and having fun while you do it. . . What we learn isn't as important as the learning itself. The most important thing we can learn is how to learn. . .risk taking for a company is essential. If you don't risk, you don't grow.' They live by their beliefs and their success is the yardstick by which these beliefs are judged.
PRINCIPLE ELEVEN: CELEBRATE
There is nothing more fun than the celebration of a success or a shared win. The celebration itself creates energy for ongoing efforts. What gets recognized gets repeated; what gets celebrated becomes a habit. Individual recognition and group celebration fuel high performance. 12American Skandia, a manufacturer and wholesaler of insurance and financial planning products and services to brokers and financial planners, takes great pains to make the effort to catch and compliment people doing something right. Like many of the successful companies featured in Fun Works, American Skandia hires for attitude and trains for skills. And they celebrate every success they can find.
IN ADDITION TO BEING ILLUSTRATED BY A CASE COMPANY, each of the Principles of Fun/Work Fusion has a key which, if turned by the reader, will help to unlock the principle so that it can be applied individually and/or to a company action plan. These keys are thoughts, actions, and behaviors that, if applied, will increase your ability to employ the specific principle in your life.
Because we human beings love to know how we rank in categories ranging from ‘How good is your sex life?' to ‘Do you know the three secrets to overnight financial success?', we have included in Part Four your own personal ranking test: The Fun/Work Fusion Inventory. This questionnaire should give you an indication of how much fun you are having at work and help you identify areas in which you can improve. Several action steps are suggested to help you get started in the full integration of fun and work.
Part Four also contains additional inspiration for you to use as you journey along the path of integrating fun and work.
FUN WORKS IS INTENDED to provide you with examples of companies who have successfully achieved the integration of fun and work in the hope that you, too, will discover the value of this natural condition and choose to create and live it for yourself.
We hope the process is as much fun for you as it was for us.
