Fun.
So often lacking in business. Or forced. Or contrived.
Or plain cringemaking.
I laugh when I work. Lots. Sometimes others laugh with me. I suspect often at me.
And my favourite feedback I get from people I work with?
“It was fun.” That they enjoyed it.
Do we get results? Absolutely. Funnily enough (funny strange, not funny ha ha), we seem to get better stuff done when we enjoy it.
We even get things done when the odds are against us.
I recently chaired a group tweaking the constitution of a large human rights organisation. We’d been avoiding it for years because it was going to be too hard, and nigh-on impossible to get through an activist membership – people tend to be too suspicious. But our group laughed a lot, even though the work was deadly serious. And we ended up rewriting the constitution from the ground up and got it passed by 75% of an activist AGM.
Don’t park your fun outside the office – real or virtual. Bring it in, water it, watch it flourish.
And don’t take yourself so seriously. We can still be great at what we do without our faces wearing the expression of a cat’s clenched buttocks. Lighten up – surely it’s better to be great at what we do AND have people enjoy working with us rather than being effective and anodyne?
And, you over-earnest founder CEOs, don’t think of fun as events or activities you need to organise or fund. You need to focus on the company being fun, not doing fun.
Because fun is culture, not activities. When your culture is fun, then the day-to-day brings joy.
I’ve laughed with people I’ve worked with through spreadsheets. Yup. Spreadsheets (I can feel some of you pulling away now). But it was because the relationship was built on getting stuff done while still enjoying ourselves.
So trying to bring fun through events when fun isn’t part of your culture will feel contrived. Your team will feel it. They will cringe. They’ll switch their cameras off.
They’ll take inappropriately long times in the toilet.
Because fun is attitude, not script. Humanity, not organised games.
Build fun into the fabric of how your company is. Your team will thank you for it. You’ll thank them for it.
And if no one thanks anyone else, then you all deserve each other, and you’ll probably still have secretly enjoyed each other’s ingratitude in your own ornery and cantankerous way!
How we can support you
- Join us on a workshop on how to scale your company; create time to focus on the bigger picture; and keep values and purpose core to your company. For max 5 CEOs of companies with revenues between £1.5m and £15m.
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