Down with fun: The depressing vogue for having fun at work

http://www.economist.com/node/17035923/

by blasdel • 16 years ago

112 74 16 years ago

blasdel• 16 years ago

Tony Hsieh's presentation at Startup School 2009 came off exactly like this to me, but I don't come to the same conclusion as the author — encouraging your employees to do jackass 'fun' stunts with attendant PR isn't much worse than just stocking the office with alcohol, though at least the latter is more honest and self-directed — at least they aren't going to show up at your cube as a mob and cajole you into doing a keg stand.

During the QA period I tried asking him what he thought about apparel startups that are going for the same no-discount high-touch model but starting with original goods instead of competing with retail (http://www.bonobos.com/ is most prominent, but there are a whole bunch). He interpreted that as if they were "copying the culture" and gave an obviously stock answer that set it up as a strawman doomed to failure.

howard_yeh• 16 years ago

reminds me of what George Bernard Shaw said, "do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."

gruseom3• 16 years ago

It has always seemed to me that if the work is good then it doesn't need sugar on top. What one wants is hard, interesting problems to solve and great people to work with. Once you have that, work is more fun than "fun".

Edit: But I have to say something about that asinine first paragraph. First, judging history by recent television dramas? He's joking, right? Second, the corporate culture of the early 1960s was notoriously soul-destroying and its loss is nothing to moan about.

maxawaytoolong• 16 years ago

Having done a 2 year stint at an ecommerce startup, I will have to say that there is not too much fun or goodness to be found in the work itself. In a solid but fundamentally boring business idea like this, there are two approaches I've seen work for employee retention: vastly overpay everyone (the "wall street" strategy) or create a weird corporate "FUN" atmosphere (the "zappos" strategy.)

As much as the zappos strategy freaks me out it probably works better in he long run than overpaying because the shrewd but overpaid programmer will simply stick it out a few years, amass a bunch of cash, and then bail to go back to school or start a startup or trek across the world or whatever more interesting thing they had plans on doing with he money. The weirdos who really like the nerf ball fights will stick around forever on average wages.

Also with big ecommerce operations there are a huge number of specialized non programming roles like "merch planner: womens' flats" who are stuck working for one of maybe 5 companies in the world so even a corny, but positive culture change is an HR win over a competitor.

gruseom3• 16 years ago

Good points. It does make me wonder, though, what would happen if everyone simply began refusing to do meaningless work. Would the world grind to a halt? I doubt it. I bet we'd eventually figure out how to reorganize things.

mgrouchy• 16 years ago

Where I work is pretty fun, however, I feel like as a company/startup grows it becomes harder and harder to keep it fun.

Not in the sense it that it is no longer fun at all, but keeping the same "culture" fit with new team members is hard. Your companies "culture" is something that grows organically with early employees, but as you hire more people, eventually much of your company "culture" moves towards ritual, which while is intended to improve the culture it is less genuine.

jat850• 16 years ago

The first time this happened:

"The company engages in regular “random acts of kindness”: workers form a noisy conga line and single out one of their colleagues for praise. The praisee then has to wear a silly hat for a week."

I would make it very clear it shouldn't happen again. If it did, I'd leave the company.

Lazlo_Nibble• 16 years ago

Someone apparently swapped the definitions of "random kindness" and "humiliating harassment" in Zappos' corporate HR policy.

(On the other hand, if it'll help morale, I'm willing to suck it up and attend my company's upcoming pennant-race baseball outing. If asked nicely I might take one for the team and participate in multiple such events through the end of the postseason.)

Cushman• 16 years ago

Does anyone else see the irony implicit in "regular random acts of kindness"?

aerique• 16 years ago

Radioactive decay is random yet regular, so: no :-)

pjscott• 16 years ago

If I had to implement something like that, I would make sure that the recipients of these acts of kindness were chosen uniformly at random from the entire workforce, and that the times between acts of kindness were exponentially distributed random variables. It would just feel right to be able to say that our "random acts of kindness" are a Poisson process.

Or better yet, abandon the entire idea and get a rock climbing wall instead. I love those things.

jimbokun• 16 years ago

"The most unpleasant thing about the fashion for fun is that it is mixed with a large dose of coercion. Companies such as Zappos don’t merely celebrate wackiness. They more or less require it."

Made me remember this scene.

http://movieclips.com/watch/office-space-1999/flair-minimum/

_cbsz• 16 years ago

I can't speak for everyone, but based on my experience, regularly drinking (even lightly) during the day would be likely to cause significant productivity loss. Duh?

enjo• 16 years ago

Not true for me. I'll often have a beer or two at lunch. The company itself has developed a high-end beer day tradition every week. I've noticed very little difference in my productivity... except that I'm a bit more relaxed and probably able to focus slightly better.

Of course there is a line to walk between a couple of beer and the three martini lunch.

rudasn2• 16 years ago

> Of course there is a line to walk between a couple of beer and the three martini lunch.

That is true for productivity but what about your health? I like drinking as much as the next guy but drinking a couple of beers every day, at work, just to "relax" and "focus better" seems like a bad tactic.

blogimus2• 16 years ago

Unless you can hit the Balmer Peak

http://xkcd.com/323/

ImperatorLunae• 16 years ago

This reminds me of a group of roommates I had in college. They played Super Smash Brothers: Melee for the Nintendo Game Cube perpetually. They played the same level--a flat level without platforms or items--over and over again for one reason--to get better. They had little interest in having fun and cared more about being the best.

One of our other roommates suggested that they play the game to have fun. They liked the suggestion and, as they began playing again, started to compete over who was having the most fun. My other roommate's comments had completely missed them.

il• 16 years ago

My college roommates were obsessed with playing Final Destination in Smash without items and spamming cheap attacks to win. Guess that practice is more common than I thought.

SamReidHughes• 16 years ago

It sounds like they were having lots of fun. When I was in college, we'd configure the random level selector to always select Final Destination, so that we didn't have to bother moving the pointer a few inches.

Osmose• 16 years ago

The implicit assumption here is that the game is always more fun with items and platforms.

Personally, I find it more fun to try and become a better player. Learning new ways to glitch the system, how to counter different strategies. From a competitive view, the fun is reduced when things like the environment or randomly-placed items remove the "fairness" of the competition and favor one character over another.

Goosey• 16 years ago

Just sounds like your "other roommate"'s idea of what is fun was in different alignment from theirs. Rather than accept different tastes an attempt was made to coerce them (by use of negative language - "why not just play for fun") into playing for the same purpose he did. Unsurprisingly they found a way to have fun despite being forced into a new playing style.

scott_s• 16 years ago

Some people find fun in competition and improving their skills.

keyle• 16 years ago

I don't know about you, but Mad Men isn't exactly scientific research. It's a tv show about the advertising industry. I worked in that industry a few years, it's still a lot of fun, and they still drink at work, sleep with each others and treat women badly.

Also from my parent's perspective, they didn't have much fun at work, they were working long hours and put up with so much because switching job wasn't exactly as easy as today.

Finally, I don't require a rock climbing wall at work, I just want to do good work with good people and I will have fun naturally.

martingordon• 16 years ago

Good coworkers can make up for a bad work environment, but a good work environment can't make up for bad coworkers.

msg• 16 years ago

shorter Economist:

Fake fun: ball pits. Real Fun: smoking and drinking at the office, office romances shading into sexual harassment. Why can't boys be boys?

"While imposing ersatz fun on their employees, companies are battling against the real thing. Many force smokers to huddle outside like furtive criminals. Few allow their employees to drink at lunch time, let alone earlier in the day. A regiment of busybodies—from lawyers to human-resources functionaries—is waging war on office romance, particularly between people of different ranks. Hewlett-Packard, a computer-maker, recently sacked its successful chief executive, Mark Hurd, after a contractor made vague allegations—later quietly settled—of sexual harassment. (Oracle, a rival, quickly snapped up Mr Hurd.)"

neilk2• 16 years ago

Always remember that the Economist is written by 24-year-old grad students trying to sound like wise old men.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist#Editorial_anonymi...

3pt14159• 16 years ago

Don't pass off other people's speculations as facts and then quote Wikipedia as if there is a reliable source in there that backs up what you are saying.

eds• 16 years ago

I love it! Just re-subscribed thanks to your comment.

angrycoder• 16 years ago

The thing about fun is that is only really fun when you aren't supposed to be doing it. Corporate mandated fun rarely is.

_delirium• 16 years ago

Seems like Disney was ahead of the curve: this "corporate wacky fun" employment atmosphere used to be a trademark of theirs. They still do it, but it's no longer the only place like that.

I'd be curious if there's any direct link/borrowing, or if it's an independent invention.

joshuacc• 16 years ago

I'm not sure if it's still done, but businesses used to send groups of management to Disney World or Disney Land to watch the training/cultural-initiation of new Disney employees in order to bring ideas back to HomeCorp.

brown9-22• 16 years ago

Isn't it a bit dangerous to assume that Mad Men accurately reflects workplace culture from the 60s?

blogimus2• 16 years ago

One could argue that it is inaccurate, but how is it dangerous?

brown9-22• 16 years ago

I mean dangerous to the article's central thesis.

krschultz2• 16 years ago

All of the people I talked to who worked in that industry in that time period and watch the show think it is pretty accurate (sample size: 2). Or as they said "that show seems rediculous, but that is actually how it was. people used to get drunk at work. people used to chain smoke all day. your boss would berate you constantly and the only reward was your paycheck, no one was coddling you"

1337p337• 16 years ago

The last two places I worked did this kind of thing. The most recent (not to be too hard on them; I did love them, but forced fun is as depressing as the article says,= even at the best companies) had a few bizarre practices. The worst, which I discovered on my first Friday, was a surprise round of questions, one from each employee, to the newest hire. A corporate truth-or-dare ambush, without the option of dares.

I was caught off-guard and somewhat upset at being put on the spot, so I answered each question either as literally as possible or with a meandering, humorous story about wanting to punch out Michael Eisner. I was initially the only one not having shadenfreude-fueled "fun", but possibly the only one having fun by the end, to my later regret. (I admit, it was somewhat childish.) I heard that my answers were the reason it was more or less discontinued, so it was a minor victory if a moral loss.

We habitually stopped working around 4 on Fridays to drink beer on the roof. This, too, could have been lots of fun if it were optional, and often was anyway. But if you enjoy your job (or just want to finish this one module so I don't have to do it Monday, dammit), this sort of concentration-break is annoying at best. Eventually, I realized it couldn't possibly be a firing offense to work instead of drinking, so I did when I could get away with it.

Not long after the new VP of Engineering arrived, the partying and beers often became Powerpoint presentations about the company's Bold New Direction and ice cream sandwiches, complete with a pep-rally furor, prolonged on-cue applause of the type that made one feel as if the first to quit clapping would be executed, and the occasional singling out of teams that were behind deadlines, with the death-march resuming after the meetings.

Off-topic epilogue, don't read: I hear the death march has stopped (three or four months total; I didn't participate on weekends, or care if I got fired at that point, which I did immediately in the purge after the Great Rewrite launched) and people are back to a sort of normal schedule. I guess forced fun is a good indicator of attempts to freeze or create company culture, maybe even the canary in the mineshaft, warning you that the company's culture is approaching dangerous toxicity. I still love most of my old colleagues and most of the management, which is part of the reason I stuck around long enough to get fired.

lumisura• 16 years ago

Seems strange that these companies are taking this approach to promote "fun". I always thought it was all about the people you work with, the best companies I've ever worked for had the best teams. Going to work everyday and having those smart people to talk to was always fun, even if the work itself was sometimes boring. No need for a cheer squad. If they feel the need to do something like this...makes me wonder about their teams.

adorton• 16 years ago

My office has a few pool tables, foosball, and some high-end gaming PCs. These things are nice, and I enjoy them, but I've worked where I work for almost four years because the pay is excellent and I enjoy my work. To me, money and job satisfaction are key.

Unlimited coffee doesn't hurt either.

cmoylan• 16 years ago

Rather than force fun, I think it's much more effective for management to simply loosen up and let people be themselves. I work at a large company where management doesn't really care how people go about their work, as long as it gets done.

roc• 16 years ago

A planned, documented 'team building exercise' has knowable risks and liabilities. "Letting people be themselves" is the stuff of nightmares to HR people.

"organic fun" in workplaces is great while it lasts, but that seems to only be until the first lawsuit.

seldo2• 16 years ago

This article tries to say that fake-fun at offices should be banned, but what it actually says is that what modern companies do for fun isn't their idea of fun (their idea of fun seems to involve smoking and drinking and sexually harrassing co-workers).

Believe it or not, Googlers love the ball pits and the massages, and Twitter peeps are very appreciative of the HR people whose job it is to make sure everyone's happy (contrary to the E's report, it more often involves firing people who suck than handing out cold towels).

houseabsolute• 16 years ago

Drinking is very good, and not all office romance is sexual harassment, although it's true the article's examples are . . . unfortunate. I think the article's message is a sound one: Googlers talk about how much they love the ball pits, but I don't know anyone who's gone in more than once. However, we all enjoy the team bar in the hallway. There is something to the idea that "fake fun" is not as fun as "real fun" -- the kind people opt to enjoy when left to their own devices.

I do agree that fake fun is still better than no fun at all. But I think, as someone who works at one of these places that tries to make everything fun, that I enjoy the types of fun I have with coworkers that aren't engineered more than the types of fun that are.

seldo2• 16 years ago

As a non-drinker and non-smoker I can't speak to the fun of those things anywhere, far less at work. Sexual harrassment would be super-entertaining but probably less so for my co-workers.

So, I guess it's a ball pit for me.

sown• 16 years ago

I think there's something classy and fun about sitting at your desk alone, smoking half a pack a day, and drinking vodka out of a plastic cup.

bad_user• 16 years ago

> involve smoking and drinking and sexually harrassing co-workers

I read it as trusting your employees to behave like adults ... like not to get drunk, and to let them engage in harmless flirting or even dating. A wink is not sexual harassment, a joke about sex (even if a little brutal) is not sexual harassment.

Also, people have their own habits / vices ... if you've got smokers in your company, provide a place were they can smoke. I mean, you've got money for masseuses, can't you find 10 spare square meters with air conditioning?

What's wrong with that?

Instead of having a "fun department", just let people be who they are.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

> a joke about sex (even if a little brutal) is not sexual harassment.

That's an issue of quantity and quality, not of the thing per se. Enough jokes about sex aimed at the same person and it could easily be sexual harassment.

caf• 16 years ago

Even if you do accept the dubious assumption that Mad Men is an accurate depicition of "the good old days", the author seems to have missed the point (or just wasn't paying attention).

The constant drinking has caught up with several of the characters - one character has his foot mashed, permanently disabling him, during drink-fuelled office "fun". In the latest episodes, even Don is cutting down...

al3x• 16 years ago

There are people who like a "fun" office culture, and there are people who don't. What these companies are doing is creating workforces that are, in part, self-selecting.

I have my opinions about the value of workplace wackiness, but it gets the hires in the door. The question is, are those the right hires?

PaddyCorry• 16 years ago

Great article, enforced corporate 'fun' is always horrific, couldn't agree more.

Perhaps slightly off-topic, but recently enough where I work, there was an attempt at measuring the happiness of the workforce. Everyone was encouraged to register how happy they were, once per day, by clicking on a survey link. The choices were: 0% happy, 25% happy, 50%, 75% or, yes, 100% happy.

The results were aggregated (a basic average I believe) and emailed to management, who then supposedly knew how happy >everyone< was.

Putting aside the obvious problems with this approach, it kicked off some funny quasi-philosophical debates each day (e.g. am I 50% or 75% happy?, Do I register how happy I am with work, or in general?). Bizarre stuff, it didn't last very long.

Tyrannosaurs• 16 years ago

I have no issue with corporate fun, so long as it's opt-in.

I've seen very few things companies do for "fun" to be universally hated and similarly few are universally loved - most fall somewhere in the middle.

Make it opt-in and it's all fine, enforce it and you're likely to do more harm than good.

krschultz2• 16 years ago

Corporate "fun" and team fun are two very different things. Just let each team do what they want to do and if you have good coworkers, the fun will happen organically.

Last thursday my team decided to go to a bar. About 15 of the engineers went, and it was a decent time. Was it as fun as my college days with my dorm friends? Of course not. Was it better than the company picnic? Hell yes.

A few of the "fun" things that I've done with companies that actually worked:

I worked in an office that was a converted residential house, we had a BBQ every friday in the summer. Simple, cheap, but honestly taking an hour and enjoying the summer weather on the back porch in the middle of your work day goes a long way for moral.

Pranks. This can go too far, but in moderation really is funny.

Going out to a bar if you actually like the people you work with.

Skydiving, not everyone did it but you want to talk about a "team building" exercise, have everyone jump out of a plane together.

Almost all of those that worked were organically started by the guys in our team. My current company has no "fun" policy as I see it, but my coworkers are fun, and that makes all the difference.

ahoyhere3• 16 years ago

I think I may have worked at the most "fun" corporate environment ever. The parties! The BBQ! The evenings on the roof top deck in Tribeca! The pillow room! The Wii! The wall-o'-drinks! The buddha statues! The one-team-cooks-a-full-lunch day once a month! The expeditions to South's! That one guy who was always napping in the weirdest places trying to be polyphasic! The singing, the dancing and the hilarious coworkers.

The key difference between that workplace and the others I've experienced/observed, was that the fun was bottom-up instead of top-down. It wasn't cheesy, but it was real. If an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man, well, Limewire had a pretty whacky shadow, but the air of freedom was what led us to all bring our own flavor to it. We weren't whacky, even though the guy who ran it was whacky. We just did what we wanted and made our own fun. The biz-sponsored parties were the only orchestrated element, other than the cooking.

Ah, Limewire, I miss you sometimes.

m0th87• 16 years ago

Hah, as I read your comment I thought "this description sounds exactly like Limewire." Did you work with Mike S?

ahoyhere3• 16 years ago

Don't think so. Was he part of Store? Cuz I left before their hiring really picked up steam. Heard it really went downhill right after I left (not claiming that was why).

bitwize• 16 years ago

Sounds like a happening place to work. Too bad their main line of business was aiding and abetting the theft of copyrighted material.

ahoyhere3• 16 years ago

Guess where I worked after that? Bear Stearns! rimshot

(but only as a freelancer)

Coming from a state where all the rich people are employed in fields that involve blowing up innocent people with bombs, I rest easy.

balding_n_tired• 16 years ago

I have seen drinking lunch and pretty blatant sexual harassment in the work place. (Drunk boss chases female subordinate around the room; bosses sleep with secretaries; computer operator consumes 5 mixed drinks at a company party, then bollixes an upgrade.) So the old-timey fun as The Economist seems to define it is something I don't much miss.

melissamiranda• 16 years ago

Would you rather work at Twitter (or other fun obsessed office) or 37Signals?

nadadenada• 16 years ago

To be fun at work there must be plenty of options to communicate with coworkers. Sometime to be slow is the funniest thing.

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

I ride a bike for fun, or hike a trail, or sleep under the stars. Please don't insult me with hats and balls and fake parties.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

It's really simple: forced fun isn't.

ibejoeb• 16 years ago

> workers form a noisy conga line and single out one of their colleagues for praise. The praisee then has to wear a silly hat for a week.

Where can one who is postpubescent go for a decent day's work nowadays?

CallMeV• 16 years ago

That's not fun. That's smoking, drinking and having sex - adult activities, not the regressive infantilism one usually associates with "workplace fun."

If you smoke at your desk, someone will complain about catching secondary lung cancer or it might trigger an asthma attack. Also, the workplace will stink of cigarette, cigar or pipe smoke - not a good sign if you're trying to win a contract from a health store.

If you drink, you'll get drunk at work. Fights could break out, and you'll screw up work that you should be concentrating on. And if you have to get into a car and take off for the client at a moment's notice whilst still drunk, that's deadly lethal.

Other kinds of drugs? Not really. Drinking at work is close to lawbreaking especially where you might need to drive to a client, but smoking a joint in the office is right out.

As for sex ... forget it. You're not going to work for that. You go to work to earn money for you and the company. Where does that sort of adult activity end? Do you allow open displays of sexual activity? Does your firm only allow straight affairs, or do you still go all Victorian if two lesbians or two gay guys take off on some torrid affair, all open public displays of affection in the workplace?

Think about all those employees at your workplace. Think of the one or two that always crop up, even in the most enlightened offices, who will sneer and grumble "Disgusting" under their breath at the sight of two guys locking lips in the copy room.

I know that firms need policies of fun at work to prevent them becoming grim, isolated monasteries. But smoking, drinking and sex are not the best choices of "fun" to allow in the workplace, any more than conversations about sex, football, politics or religion at the watercooler.

MartinRedford2• 16 years ago

One very important thing about the concept of fun is that you do what you want, when you want to. The fact that they need impose simply creates a disposition in the minds of all who fall under such a constraint.

But let's be honest, this is clearly not the best way to boost productivity. If what is needed are better ideas and the best of ones effort, what should be done is to fill employees pockets with money, shorten work hours, remove authority positions. Let's not turn a blind eye, invest money and a work force, in trying to devise a better method for such a purpose. It's just a waste of both.

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docgnome• 16 years ago

"The ad-men in those days enjoyed simple pleasures. They puffed away at their desks. They drank throughout the day. They had affairs with their colleagues. They socialised not in order to bond, but in order to get drunk."

Uhm... That sounds pretty terrible to me. I don't want to work with those people.

Down with fun: The depressing vogue for having fun at work

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