When Work Is Fun: Case Studies
Do you have a story to share about work and fun? Please
share it with us.
In my spare time, I act as an official at international
hot air balloon competitions. Which is basically fun.... If we didn't
have to get up at 04:30 everyday, act as nose-wipers to other parts
of the competition, spend hours (and hours and hours) trying to get
a complete picture of what has happened during a flight. What seems
to happen is that we'll all be in "mental parked", waiting for the next
pressure situation, when someone will start a silly game or dance -
we all join in like little kids, laugh like drains, & carry on with
the serious things. Example: we were waiting on the launch-field a couple
of weeks ago, 06:30, hoping the cloud/fog (Southern Spain in late June???)
would break up. 13 of us standing in a loose circle, when suddenly someone
started singing "Old Macdonald...", pushed our Japanese colleague into
the middle of the circle, where he proceeded to provide the animal noises
& actions! It lasted maybe a minute, it was something between the 13
of us (British, German, Danish, Belgian, Luxembouger, American, Australian
& of course Japanese), & it made the rest of the waiting a breeze!
Dave Bramwell
---
My work is mainly fun. I work as a Visual Facilitator
or Graphic Recorder, and when I sit in a meeting drawing whatever people
say, if I find the tight metaphor, and when participants afterwards
say: hey, you really got it! you brought our meeting to the point! and
if they laugh about the little jokes I draw to dress the truth, I am
happy. If you want to understand, please look at our Website.
Right now it is only in German, but you might get some of the pictures.
The task: to create a large poster for the introduction of a new agency.
With 6 fields of activities, and one picture for each of them. One field:
strategies, policies, partnering, outsourcing etc. Looking for a matching
picture I let my mind flow. Metaphors? stories? fairytales? which one?
I stopped at the German fairy tale of Hþnsel & Gretel, meeting a witch
who wants to capture Hþnsel, put him into a cage and eat him. So my
picture was : the luring witch, and Hþnsel and Gretel looking anxiously.
The text idea was: "ei, ei, shouldn't we outsource our little Hþnsel?"
I had fun at several moments:
- when I found the idea, or when it found me
- when I finished the picture
- when I watched people having fun understanding the picture in a
second
Reinhard
KuchenmŸller
---
It's midnight, the day before an important report
must be presented to the client. The document has been proofread countless
times but, nevertheless, a major glaring error shows up on one page
in the middle of a 1" thick, Cerlox-bound document (with 6 copies).
The print shop is shut down for the night and there is no apparent way
to get the pages replaced in time for the morning presentation. I can't
tell you how much fun we had with this "mission impossible". Within
one hour we had fixed the problem using an old consultant's trick, inserting
a Cerlox-punched page in the middle of a document without taking the
document apart.
David Talbot
---
Just yesterday in a team meeting we did an experience
around creating a vision. We each took a piece of flip chart paper.
Our assignment was to either with words or images or both say what we
saw as a vision for our project in the near ( up to 5 year) term. We
spent about 10 minutes silently doing this in the same room. I was not
thinking it would be fun but I along with my colleagues really got into
it. The reason I thought it might not be fun was that I had done it
many times. It was fun. Then we did a gallery walk. We walked around
the room and each person described what they had depicted. A smaller
group will compile and then everyone will have more opportunity for
input before we come to consensus. There were only 6 of us present and
the process took about 45 minutes.
Samantha Schoenfeld
---
I've wanted to respond to this request, absolutely,
but time has been a problem. The other problem is, my entire job is
fun. I suppose if I had to concentrate on one fun thing, it would be
the "What's
on Marshall Brain's Desk" area I've built. Check it out. It's totally
fun and lucky for me, I get to do this kind of stuff all day every day
:)
Rebecca Newton
---
At the first company I worked for after I left the
Navy, I was in charge of getting a lot of our long reports and analyses
out the door. Before I got there, they were done monochronically --
the whole thing put into the word processor, then the whole thing proofed,
and back and forth, then on to graphics, then proofed again, and back
and forth. I started doing it by chapters -- WP had a chapter while
I proofed another and graphics pasted up another. I was running and
reading and cajoling for a solid week. Hard work, but such a blast that
when it was done and out the door, I actually had post partum depression.
The only thing more fun was getting a proposal out -- more creative
and a tighter deadline.
I've often had fun at a challenging facilitation. The most recent one
was a group that wouldn't/couldn't give me requirements in the order
I was asking for them. I was running around the room to two flip chart
easels, a white board, and three partially-filled posted flips putting
ideas where they went. The satisfaction came from helping them get their
thoughts organized. The fun came from meeting the challenge.
I'm noticing some common themes already: busy, juggling, hard work,
and polychronicity (if I'm using those words right: I haven't read Lou's
critique of my use in full yet).
While not quite work, I've had a lot of fun as participant in training
workshops. The two that stand out in my mind are the NTL Training Theory
and Practice lab and the US Coast Guard TQM Facilitator Training. In
each case I was teaching as much as learning: I was in the experience
with all the energy and excitement I am capable of. I always feel like
I'm doing too much, saying too much in those cases, so at the debriefs
I always ask. At NTL, several people said, "We can't imagine this lab
without your energy." At the USCG, I was called by students and faculty,
"The father confessor," "the valedictorian," and I know there was a
third but that was 5 years ago and I'm getting old...
I have fun recording, when people see the value of having their stuff
written down.
I have fun facilitating learning when the people get beyond the rote
and start interacting and sharing and probing their own experiences
and attitudes (for example, sexual harassment prevention training) I
have fun listening to people's positions then offering the win/win,
either as a facilitator or as a participant.
One last thought: Whenever I see the bumper sticker, "A bad day of
fishing is better than a good day of work," I think, "Nothing is better
than a good day of work. If it is, you're in the wrong line of work."
Ned Ruete
---
For the past 7 months I have been working
with a team located in the South Caucasus. (So you ask, where is
the Caucasus? What is the Caucasus? The South Caucasus region is three
former Soviet Republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, in Central
Asia. (Check this out
for a visual). The team is an amazingly dedicated bunch of young folk
working for a non profit).
So you know that they work waaaay too much and for little tangible reward.
The magic ingredient is compassion (caring/passion). So I became very
fond of them, their talent and their mission and have had the honor
of providing coaching and mentioning to them.
Most of this has been electronic. Now we are half a world apart, right?
So most of the time we seriously and diligently work via a message board
and email. We have a lot to get done! But after our first face to face
in March, we started using instant messenger tools. And the combination
of spending 2 weeks together and getting to know each other and the
immediacy of the IM offered us a real easy way to PLAY!
Well, if you had saved all our chats, you will soon note that while
we solved problems in IM, brainstormed and were highly productive, we
also used it to tell jokes, vent and LAUGH. How many times did I type
LOL? (laughing out loud) or note that I had just spewed hot tea on my
monitor after an early morning run of clever banter. (I should get a
waterproof keyboard or stoP Frinking tea at my desk).
With a 12 hour time difference, my morning is there evening and sometimes
I think they were spitting beer!! ;-) I believe through these spontaneous
instant messages, "seeing" each other online and knowing another was
there if we needed them, or just wanted a brief moment of "contact"
has sustained both working relationships and supported a strong and
growing friendship.
Our little network has expanded to pull in friends of friends and little
by little we are weaving a web of support across time and distance.
And maybe ruining a few keyboards along the way.
Nancy White
---
I worked at City Year for a while as Director of
Development in RI. Every Friday afternoon the entire corps and staff
come together for community meeting for about 1 hour. Each week, one
of the teams of young people was responsible for planning the meeting.
The normal schedule was:
- A warm-up game
- Ripples (testimony of things that individuals participated in that
caused a positive ripple sometime in the future)
- Lifestory (a personal testimony given by one individual)
- Moccasins (a time of self-expression that allowed others to walk
in your shoes: could be a song, poem, story, whatever)
- Recognition of a community hero
- Closing
This was an incredibly powerful experience for me that was fun, engaging,
moving, overwhelming. I've never been anywhere like it. And, it was
still work - it was mandatory to be there, we often invited potential
donors to it.
Another example of work as fun: Believe it or not, most face to face
fundraising. The opportunity to meet with people, to talk to them about
their interests, to see their companies (if businesses), to relate as
people, to promote your own cause. This can be wonderful fun. Not always
- it depends a lot on the donor.
When I worked at Save the Bay, every year we had a swim across the
bay that raised lots of money for STB. It was incredibly hard work the
day of the event, but lots of fun too. The swimmers were inspiring,
coworkers crazed and silly by the end of the day (this event usually
required getting up at 3:00 am and working until noon), it was on the
water, lots of wonderful sun (most times), dogs, kids, food, etc.
Gayle L. Gifford,
CFRE
---
That was the deep fun of the job: to feel within my body that I was
pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping
upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perception, making
new and -- until that very split second of time! -- unheard-of and unfelt
effects with words. It had a bouying and tonic impact upon me; my senses
would strain to seek for more and more of such relationships; my temperature
would rise as I worked. That is writing as I feel it, a kind of significant
living.
Richard
Wright
---
"One of the experiments we have undertaken to make our work more
fun is to combine functions that have traditionally been organizationally
separated. One of the most dramatic of those combinations has been in
the areas of business development and business operations. We have worked
hard not to have Groups (divisions) that contain only "development"
or only "operations." Even within the Groups we are trying
to minimize the number of people who are engaged only in what historically
has been classified into new business and existing business categories.
Certainly, we have not achieved such an end completely and probably
never will, but neither are we likely to spin off separate companies
or divisions that just run plants or just develop new businesses. Most
of our competitors do just that.
"The early results of this approach are remarkable. I can say
with considerable confidence that few large companies in our kind of
business have such a high percentage of people active in new business
development, even though most of their working time is spent in a plant.
Almost every new business team has participation from people who operate
most of the time out of plants. Most of our people have found participation
on these teams challenging, educational, broadening - fun.
"Moreover, some of our best new business activities come from
entrepreneurial efforts by teams whose membership is primarily from
plants. The waste-to-energy efforts at Belfast West, the life extension
possibilities at Borsod and Tiszapalkonya in Hungary, refinancing at
Barbers Point, plant expansions at Placerita and Los Mina and almost
everything we are doing at Ekibastuz, to name a few. One of my current
favorites in this regard is the extraordinarily creative project at
Beaver Valley to solve its NOx problems by adding a small CFB and making
other operational changes. This project will reduce NOx levels, add
to the project's net present value (NPV), and assure its financial and
technical feasibility well into the next century. When compared to a
more conventional fix on the NOx problem, this approach will add $25-$30
million to the project's NPV. That is more than some of our new plant
development efforts. The experience will also make many folks at Beaver
Valley better able to identify and take advantage of other opportunities
for new business that the world is likely to present to us. And, maybe
most important, the whole experience will be enriching, rewarding and
fun for those involved."
from the AES
Founders Corner via Dori Digenti
---
"You wouldn't think of Brady Corporation as an obvious place in
which to find a fun culture. This traditional Midwestern company, a
manufacturer of industrial signs and other identification products,
didn't even allow employees to have coffee at their desks until 1989.
But when Katherine Hudson became CEO in 1994, she and her executive
team determined that injecting some fun into the company's serious culture
could create positive effects within the organization and contribute
to increased performance and sales.
"In this article, Hudson distills her approach to overhauling
Brady's culture into six principles of serious fun: More people than
you might think are comfortable having fun at work; used with an awareness
of cultural sensitivities, fun and laughter really are well-understood
international languages; humor can help companies get through tough
times; fun can be embodied in formal programs; spontaneous efforts at
humor can also be effective; and encouraging fun should begin at the
top. She richly illustrates each principle with examples.
"At Brady, getting people to loosen up and enjoy themselves has
fostered a company esprit de corps and greater team camaraderie. It
has started conversations that have sparked innovation, helped to memorably
convey corporate messages to employees, and increased productivity by
reducing stress, among other benefits. And the company has doubled its
sales and almost tripled its net income and market capitalization over
the past seven years. Brady's experience suggests that promoting fun
within the workplace can lead not only to a robust corporate culture
but also to improved business performance."
"Transforming
a Conservative Company - One Laugh at a Time" Katherine M.
Hudson, CEO, Brady Corporation"
|
