Work at Fun to Have Fun @ Work

Fresh out of Business School, MBA in hand, the taste of toast and mixed fruit jam still fresh in the mouth, when we joined the work place, life was very simple. You came in to work and bust your guts trying to work. We all hoped that the big boss would get impressed with our dedication. That had the potential of a generous appraisal rating for that year. Even when that did not happen, all of us gnashed our teeth, wrote his name on paper and shred that up to express our point of view (to ourselves). There was no such thing as fun at work.

Then the dot com boom happened. Young kids showed us that it was OK to be a dreamer. They quit jobs at blue chip companies and abandoned potentially hefty 12% pay hikes (that was the maximum you could get those days in my firm) in favor of an unknown world. A world where they would have the corner office by the time they were hitting twenty five. The "corner office" meant the CEO's Office and not the cubicle in the corner where the photocopier was kept. One of them had told me casually while quitting, "I want to have fun." That was blasphemy. I was no idea that we were supposed to have fun in the office. I asked the lad very apprehensively, "We are not supposed to do those fun things on the office desk? You could get sacked if you get caught." That reckless lad gave me a look that was hard to define. My logic was clear - work was meant to be making you miserable. To get away from the agony called work, we hung around with friends and had fun.

Six months down the line the young lad came back to visit us. He came in a car that I had only seen my CEO drive. Over dinner, he told us that they had a lot of fun in the office. The dress code was non existent. He could practically come to work in diapers if he chose to. Every Friday they drank beer and danced in the office which would be converted to a make shift dance floor. The Directors who were in their twenties, danced with other twenty somethings who were employees. This was truly democratisation of the workplace. Everyone traveled First Class if Business Class seats were not available. Everyone claimed they were having fun, until one day many of those places went belly up and closed shop.

Then for the next few years, everyone went back to accepting the notion that work and fun were not designed to happen at the same time and at the same place. Can you really have fun with colleagues? After all the English language has two different words to describe a colleague and friend. To complicate matters people have different definitions of fun. Sticking a "kick me" behind your classmate in school may not be appreciated by a colleague at the receiving end.

Then Outsourcing happened and a different profile of employees barely out of school and college joined the BPOs and KPOs. The workplace had to change to reflect their presence. The older employees got replaced by The Millenials. The workplace again had to have prominent elements of fun because that became a retention tool. Elements of fun were designed around making the office culture as close to a college campus as possible. You don't need to leave college when you come to work became the format of fun at work.

The more homogeneous the employee profile is, the easier it is to have one activity that fits in to a common definition of fun at work. If the primary task is not enjoyable, the importance of providing fun as an additional component at the workplace becomes important. Can the task have an inherent piece of fun built in? The more mundane and repetitive the task is, the greater is the importance of having the fun element during the workday. It has to be an activity that rejuvenates and refreshes the employee.

Fun has a connotation of informality and playfulness. So any activity that lowers the hierarchy - especially in a society that is deeply hierarchical, provides an element of fun. Hence watching the senior manager's clumsiness at a sports event during the Annual Day celebration provides much mirth. The Annual Day is by definition annual. With shorter attention spans, having fun more frequently becomes a great driver of satisfaction. So wearing business casual clothes on Fridays cannot be defined as your original contribution to livening up the world of work. Think harder. I have always been amazed how big a deal wearing casual clothes to work is made out to be. It is supposed to enhance productivity I am told. Then hippies should have been the most productive generation, Rascal Rusty would say.

Recent research shows that the Millenials like activities that let them learn new skills. Pure buffoonery is not what they define as Fun at Work. So let them learn a new language, learn salsa dancing, learn magic tricks... just let your imagination flow. Ask them about hobbies that they wished they could pursue and skills they could and should learn but do not have the time to pursue. They might come back with weird suggestions - be prepared. Having fun at work is not easy after all.

Should We Make or Buy Leaders?

When are you hitting the office again? I have some work for you to do. Go to the corner office and without spilling coffee on the carpet out of sheer nervousness, ask the occupant what he or she does for a living. The trick is to tell them upfront that "playing golf" is not one of the options they can choose. That sobers them into really thinking hard. Chances are that most of them will tell you that they are trying to make more moolah for the shareholder. Now you should step up, look at the dude straight in the eye and ask, "What are you doing to ensure that happens continuously long after you are gone?" At which point, you will probably get thrown out by the office security anyway and will never know what the correct answer should be.

The CEO's job is to ensure that there is a steady stream of ready talent at all levels of the enterprise. It is especially important for the Chief Executive to ensure that someone is ready to take over the top job should a truck cut short his own trip across the road. Whenever someone asks me whether or not to join a particular organization, I ask that person to research and look for data on how many of that company's top ten executives have been grown from within. If more than half of the top directors or functional leaders are have been nurtured through the joint efforts of the company's CEO and HR then it is a good place to go to. That is a good measure of how the company has instituted processes to grow and nurture top talent. Having said that, it makes great sense to have a healthy mix of external hires at all levels since they may bring in skills that may be needed for the future. A sixty forty ratio of in favor of internal hires helps to reassure employees that the talent pipeline has a track record of producing leaders that pass the acid test.

Like all other decisions of a firm, there is a make versus buy decision to be made not just for products and services but also for leadership talent. Growing as opposed to buying your own leadership pipeline requires deep commitment of time on part of the organization to ensure talent is identified early and then nurtured through a combination of challenging assignments, executive coaching and learning from attending the odd training program. Research done by Center for Creative Leadership tells us that approximately 70% of leadership development occurs on the job and in the context of challenging tasks, while 20% occurs interpersonally, particularly with coaches and mentors and only a measly 10% occurs in formal training classes. I believe classroom training can supplement Make sure that a person attends the training program only after they have been doing a job, that you are training them for, with reasonable rates of success.

Developing the leadership pipeline is a vital ask from the existing leaders of the organizations. Leading edge organizations have been using the Leaders Nurture Leaders approach to have leaders handpick the top managerial talent and then design programs where they devote anything from five to fifteen days in a year nurturing talent not only by giving them exposure to latest research in management or strategy, but to help them understand what it will take to be leading the organization. I have known of organizations where the CEO spends five days at an off-site with the future leaders of an organization sharing concepts, case studies and even ethical dilemmas with them.

While the lateral hires into the leadership ranks of an organization bring in a view from the outside, which is just as necessary, it is the home grown talent who serve to inspire the existing employees because that action speaks louder than words. There is a certain reassurance that comes from seeing your own colleagues take their place at the head of the table. At each level of the organization, the chosen leaders need to demonstrate that they are successful because they truly live by the values that the organization claims to have. Growing your own leaders is the same as growing your own garden. It requires the right soil, weeding and nurturing before you get to see the flowers bloom. Creating a bouquet from such flowers makes it a rewarding task even though it is infinitely faster to buy them from the local florist.

A ship more seaworthy than leadership

I have made this simple test which we adminster to half the participants at the start of their learning journeys with us. You should try it too.

(This is not a test of your values. Please answer yes/no reflecting on how you think you would really behave not how you think you should.)
You are at home about to leave for work. Your bags are packed for an evening flight, which you will catch straight from work. You will be back in a couple of days.
What would you do if-
1) You find the flush is leaking, you know the problem but it will take some time to repair. Will you try to repair it? Y / N
2) You have dropped a full cup of tea on the bed. Will you change the bedclothes? Y / N
3) The blind/ curtain is stuck and you know the steaming sun will heat up the room. Would you take the time to rectify it? Y / N
4) You come to the lift in the lobby and realize you have forgotten to switch the TV off. Would you go back? Y / N
5) While getting into the car you realize you have left behind your toilet kit. You know you can buy the necessary items from the market. Will you go back for it? Y / N

I bet, like most of our participants, you too answered Yes to the first four questions and No for the fifth. Now remember i said at the beginning of this post that we give this test to half our participants. The other half are given the same five questions but the word home in the description at the top is changed to hotel. You try the test with this alteration.
Don't you want to flip the answers exactly opposite to what you'd replied earlier? For sure most of our participants do. We share this half's answers with the other lot (who we've given the test on a different colored paper). They can't believe that everybody on the yellow sheet (the one which has the word home in the stem) answer Y,Y,Y,Y,N while almost everyone with the blue sheet (the one which has the word hotel in the stem) reply N,N,N,N,Y to the same set of questions. Then we bring to their notice the one changed word which flipped totally different switches in the two sets of people.

After a pindrop silence of a few seconds, somebody who got the home paper invariably explains the behavior of the hotel group, "Ah! That explains it. If i had been in a hotel, i too wouldn't bother with all that stuff...except my toilet kit, of course."
To me that response sums up what distinguishes a high performing organization from an also ran. But i'll come back to that later. Let me first complete the story of the participants on our learning journey. Processing their responses further we arrive at the fact that they shouldn't cosider this journey as if they are in a luxury cruise. As if we, the facilitators, are the owners responsible for running/ repairing the ship while they as passengers would focus on bathing in the sun and the the new found sea of knowledge. We emphasize that it is their journey not ours, they are not participants but crew members and in fact they own not only the voyage but the ship itself. From this discussion emerges a common uderstanding of the magic word - 'ownership'.
Magic, because once you have it, a switch comes on inside you that changes your behaviors instantaneously. Behaviors that veteran trainers and wise coaches couldn't budge with a team of horses. But unfortunately ownership is also a grossly misunderstood word. For example, if you ask the employees of a public limited company, who owns their organization? Unhesitatingly, everybody would answer,"The shareholders of course."
"And you?"
"Why only me? The CEO downwards are mere employees! We all work for improving shareholder value because they are our key staklehoders."
So the owners of our organization are a amorphous bunch of shifting individuals who may never ever even set foot in the company! They are the absentee landlords whose lands we employees till to eke out a harvest for our masters.
Let's flip a switch. We are at home, say a home bought from a loan given by an obliging bank. Do we "own" this home? Or is the banker deemed to be the owner? Technically it may be the latter but the way we tend the space we don't seem to think so. Something leaks we repair it; something stinks we throw it out; something cries we soothe it. And we nurture the garden as if we'll be living here forever.
Switch back to the organization. Here too, couldn't we consider shareholders merely as "money bags"? People investing in our company's share for their own speculative gain and whose money helps us buy more machines/ infrastructure. As against the example of the home loan earlier, why do we, in this case, bestow ownership status to the 'banker'? How come the shareholder is the one stakeholder every CEO wants to please?
The ESOPs debacle is a case in point. People bought their company stocks not to gain a share in the owership of the company but for mere pecuniary (and thus short term speculative) gain. And when that did'nt fructify they bailed out real fast.
I believe the really high performing organizations are redefining ownership beyond mere shareholding (which is short term pecuniary speculation) as real investment - the investment of time, love, and effort. Much like the investment we make in our homes. No, i am not referrring to the "family" culture of the 80's, nor the participative decision making of the noughties. Real ownership can be bought with one currency alone. And that currency is the freedom to create and to learn from mistakes while doing it.

Let me explain. Last month i shouted at my seven year old daughter for dirtying the house. She cooly responded, "This is my home too." Her way of telling me to give her space to create a mess and to learn from it herself without me "training" her all the time. Maybe she gets her genes from my wife who the other day told me to move my stuff out of her cupboard because "you keep it too clean."
Anyway, my point was that, as leaders, we usually don't respond to this everyday plea for space from our employees forcing them to conform to the prevalant culture; every time we do that we lose a chance for investing real ownership into the person. And we lose a chance to achieve our common, shared goal.
Last month when i was out on a longish work trip, the mother-daughter duo got their chance to reclaim the house. When i got back on a late night flight, i groaned as i opened the door. A tornado had hit the living room. Shreds of paper were strewn like confetti, streams of glue had made a delta under the table, a mountain of socks was topped with a barbie pointing upwards at a stuffed monkey hanging on the ceiling fan.
After i'd cooled down (and got them to clean the place up) and was getting ready for bed, the duo produced an odd looking gizmo with two paper loops at either end of a stick. I laughed aloud at its strange looks but it was they who were to have the last laugh. My daughter held up the contraption in front of my face and lauched it into the air. It was an airplane; and it flew more gracefully (and far longer) than any convetional paper airplane i might have ever made (i forgot to add: i consider myself a paper plane expert). I had started my daughter off on making her first one. And here she was teaching me my latest. A weird but completely fascinating design that worked better than the original. She'd also taught me another important lesson: that everyone needs a space to mess around, a space they can call their own.
Since then i've vowed to cede the home space to my daughter (after all she spends more time in it than i do) and receed to the bathroom which i promise to keep clean as a whistle.