All right, I admit. The headline is a bit of a tease.
Fun, as we discovered last week, exists only for itself, by its very nature resisting those who want to hijack it into being something it can never be, like useful or profitable.
Work and fun are at odds in other ways too. Work aims to bring us what we think we need, goods or services that we're hoping will make our lives better. By contrast, fun only wants to subvert those kinds of pretenses in a harmless sort of way.
Notwithstanding these basic differences, consultants are doing their best today to convince employers that the rest of us need to be having more fun at work. That sales pitch has reached a crescendo as remote workers resist returning to the office or even spending a couple of days there every week. One example of this hard sell was profiled in Fast Company this week: “The Shockingly Fun Amenity on the Roof of Capital One’s Headquarters.” It turns out that the “What’s in Your Wallet?” credit card company has installed a miniature golf course (among other things) just an elevator ride away from each employee’s workspace. Instead of fun, I’d call this more of a location perk, like really good coffee or popcorn instead of the swill and grease bags that were offered before (and still are at lesser outposts).
But while this may be little more than a publicity stunt, we can easily grasp the outcome that Capital One and their consultants were aiming for: “If we dot our workplace with fun stations, maybe our employees will associate work with enjoyment, be more eager to come in to work (instead of turning our expensive real estate into a stranded asset), and become more profitable to us in the long run.”
On the other hand, amplifying the fun-factor on the job is not only at odds with most traditional notions of work, it also won’t appeal to personality types who prefer to have their fun after the workday is done, or find that office games do little more than distract them from what is supposed to be a serious pursuit.
This is not for everybody.
In a nice little essay called “What Science Says About Having Fun At Work,” Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (who is Chief Innovation Officer at the Manpower Group and teaches business psychology at both Columbia and University College London) concludes that there are some verifiable benefits in office fun, but that they are of recent vintage and likely modest in nature.
“[T]hroughout human history, work was mostly that–work—and enjoying it was the exception rather than the norm. For example, the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded work as something to relegate to slaves. Medieval peasants worked as little as necessary, with a typical working day consisting of half a day. The Protestant work ethic, which explains the success of the British and American empires, saw work as a moral obligation rather than a hedonistic pursuit.
“Job satisfaction was low on the assembly lines of the Industrial Revolution, with any notion of fun beginning after workers clocked out. This may have prompted Oscar Wilde’s observation that ‘work is the curse of the drinking classes.’ And in communist regimes, attitudes to work may be best summarized by the Soviet mantra: ‘So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.’“
Despite these traditional differences, Chamorro-Premuzic argues that Fun at Work does precipitate a change for the better in those employees who are already wired to respond positively to a more relaxed environment. If that's you, a more playful atmosphere “increases your propensity to be nice and to avoid being a toxic colleague.” But he also notes that even when an organization wants to foster a culture of diversity and inclusion that includes fun-lovers, a balance needs to be struck. A little (as opposed to a lot of) Fun at Work may be all that the doctor should order.
The essay ends by reminding us about just how out of touch with the rest of the world we are when we insist upon bringing more fun into the office. Indeed, few people elsewhere are as fortunate as we are, and it’s useful to recall that wanting to have fun while working and the passion about a job that fun supposedly brings “is truly a #firstworldproblem. As Scott Galloway [has] noted, ‘follow your passion’ is useful career advice only for those who have no financial concerns.” In other words, we're blind to the good fortune that enables at least some of us can go to work for the fun they can have while doing it.
But beyond any moral suspicions about fun-seekers who want to follow their passions into the sunset, I think that promising more Fun at Work might also be a slightly subversive way of coming at a real problem in a genuinely helpful way. Better organizations and consultants are saying today: “Maybe work will never be enjoyable exactly, but we can make it more satisfying so that you’ll do even more of it than you are now; the quality of it will improve and never flag; you’ll become more valuable to us as an employee; and remain both a contented contributor to our efforts and a return-on-investment in the long run.
Providing greater satisfaction on the job is a different, but related kind of win-win.
Several experts, steeped in organizational psychology, want to improve the amount of “intrinsic motivation” that you bring to work—or how much the four corners of a job “ring your personal bells” while you’re doing it (in addition to providing you with a paycheck and other financial rewards) thereby making you “feel good” all around about doing something that by definition can never (in itself) be fun.
Finding a job (any job) that meets motivations you already have can feel like a light bulb going off because you've finally discovered a way to run your personal cylinders on a continuous flow of positive energy.
Understanding one’s intrinsic motivations may be the key to both finding and doing good work. For example:
- Do you prefer a sense of control or autonomy in the jobs that you’re given to do?
- Do you strive for jobs with greater prominence and the status that often comes with it?
- How important to you is seeking more certainty around the outcomes of your work?
- To what extent are you looking for connection with others while working?
- How important to you is fighting unfairness and creating a space around your job where everyone has an equal opportunity to benefit from what you're doing?
In other words, how much of a motivator are job characteristics like Status, Certainty, Autonomy (control), Relatedness (connection), and Fairness for you? Or even more powerfully, how much does the absence of one or more of these features (like lack of control over your work outcomes) operate as a disincentive when it comes to doing your job?
According to intrinsic motivation theory, the more that a particular job has features (or “domains” in the parlance) that are personally important to you, the more likely that job will be satisfying to you as well.
Now it should be said that many workers (usually reported at around 15-20% of us) are not seeking a sense of engagement with or satisfaction from their work. Many people don’t feel the need to care about what they’re doing, and a huge percentage of them that are “actively disengaged” from the work that they’re doing everyday. The fact is that most people in the workforce view their jobs simply as a means to “the end” of a paycheck and employment benefits like health care. Moreover, in at least one 2013 study, there appears to be a surprisingly small overlap (only 9%) between how much you love your job (for reasons as diverse as “it’s fun” to “it fits me like a glove”) and how well you actually perform it. These rather depressing statistics notwithstanding, it’s my conviction that more people would seek job satisfaction as a benefit of employment and also perform better in their jobs if they (and their bosses) only knew how to improve the fit between their intrinsic motivations and the jobs that they're doing.
In a ground-breaking application of intrinsic motivation studies done over a half-century by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci (summarized here in a 2017 American Psychological Association article about their work), a British teacher and entrepreneur with a doctorate in the neuroscience of leadership (a practitioner’s degree), David Rock became fascinated by something called “the Why network.” Instead of how we work or could do it better, he became preoccupied with why we do it.
Rock discovered that when people generally, and workers in particular, were asking “Why am I doing this” on a regular basis, they became more critically reflective about the ways that they’re spending half (or more) of their lives, which of course is at work.
Why am I working? If it’s primarily for the economic benefits, why aren’t I seeking non-economic benefits that are available too, like greater job satisfaction? And perhaps most importantly, why aren't there practical ways for me to enhance my satisfaction at a particular job or to point myself in the direction of a new job that will be more satisfying than the ones that I’ve done before?
Rock discovered that the brain activity of his human subjects became more “engaged, flexible; resilient and creative” when they wondered “why” instead of “how" am I doing it, and that this line of questioning was more motivating to people the “higher up” (or farther you've gotten) on the job ladder.
I discovered Rock’s work in a podcast called The New Way We Work. The particular episode where Rock was interviewed (35 minutes on June 20, 2022) is called “The Science of What Makes Work Meaningful” and it's excellent. With brief testing about his five principle job motivators (Status, Certainty, Autonomy,, Relatedness, and Fairness—or SCARF for short), workers as well as those who are new to the workforce could begin to identify the availability of these characteristics in jobs that are being done in their organizations or at new ones that they could explore. In essence, with the help of tools like this and Rock's brand of expertise you can better tailor your intrinsic motivations to a particular job.
You can begin to find the right "job fit" by testing yourself to discover the job characteristics and motivational drivers that you need in your work if you want a job that satisfies you more. Rock's organization has made the SCARF Assessment available for free. It should take you no more than a couple of minutes to complete and receive by email a rudimentary (but illuminating) "intrinsic motivation" profile.
Interestingly in his podcast interview, Rock commented on how pandemic-driven, remote work has been particularly impactful on workers who value Control in their jobs. It’s hardly surprising. Those working from home in particular have had the satisfaction of having greater control over where they work as well as their diet, exercise, child care and protection from outside germs. Employer attempts to take that control away from those who have valued it by insisting upon return to the office without corresponding pay-backs has (as we know) been an invitation to disaster. Accordingly, for employees who are keeping their work-from-home or hybrid work environments, Rock recommends that they install “mouse giggling” devices in their remote offices so that surveillance-oriented employers who monitor their computer time think that you’re working even whether you are or not. This isn't the subversive advice of a fun-seeker. Since most remote-worker productivity levels have been higher than they'd been in the office during the pandemic, finding ways to safeguard these workers' sense of control should not only be a way to support productive workers but also to retain them in a competitive job market. If employers dont know that already, remote workers should take matters into their own hands.
Rock’s practical approach to improving job satisfaction, along with the neuroscience behind it, are closely aligned with the thinking that will be available in my book one day. Other posts here that have talked about similar pathways to work-life-reward include the recent Having a Job That Completes Youabout "job-crafting," and the related post from 2019 that preceded it, Making Our Jobs as Bid (or as Small) as Possible.
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Stay cool. Enjoy the week. I’ll see you next Sunday.
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