Can our places of work be places of fun?

When Scrum Mastering, I often try to inject a bit of ‘fun’ here and there. Particularly when it comes to retrospectives, for which I think it’s important to get the team to come out their work mindset and into a more relaxed and creative state of mind.

Many Scrum Masters that I’ve worked with do similarly, starting retrospectives with some kind of warm up or activity to get the team into retro-mode. We might even describe these activities as ‘fun’. But are they actually fun?

I recently watched a great TED Talk by Catherine Price on having fun, and how it is the secret to a healthier life. She breaks it down into three components, which are all vital for fun to happen; playfulness, connectedness and flow. I want to explore how we can consider these crucial elements from a workplace perspective.

Playfulness is when people have a light hearted attitude, they are living in this moment for the enjoyment it is bringing, and not thinking about some future outcome.

This rules out my classic ‘fun’ game of flipping coins, which I use sometimes with the intention of teaching batch sizes or limiting Work in Progress. But I always bring chocolate coins — that ups the fun, right?

Well, maybe. It may well be that the people racing to get all the coins flipped are actually having fun, but when we look at it a bit closer, I have a secret outcome, an ulterior motive to pure fun, which is learning or better understanding of some principle. Whether or not that takes away from the playfulness is certainly debatable.

The coin flip activity may not be ‘fun’ after all!

Connection is all about having a shared experience. While you can have fun on your own, it’s argued that that you have more fun if you are sharing that with others.

This feels easy to achieve in the workplace, at least when we are surrounded by teammates. However, some things that at first glance give us connection, actually end up being quite solo activities, that we just happen to be doing at the same time. It’s also worth considering that connection is arguably harder to feel when the people are working remotely or in a distributed team. It is certainly not impossible, but it takes more effort to achieve the connected feeling.

Cyclists who are perhaps having more fun cycling together than they would be cycling alone.

Flow is what we feel when we’re doing something and we lose track of time, or we are ‘in the zone’. How many times have we heard the phrase ‘time flies when you’re having fun’? This is flow!

Flow is more than just about being in the zone though, it’s about removing the barriers to that. Some people are already quite good at recognising their need for flow, and might set a “do not disturb” or block out calendar time to reduce interruptions. We do this for our work so that we are more productive in our output. Doing this for our fun, and protecting that fun time, means we are more likely to get more out of it; more productive fun.

These children seem to be experiencing flow while enjoying something on the laptop. I wonder how much fun they are having — or whether they know how much time has passed!

So why would we even care about making these three things click in the workplace? Fun is great and all, but aren’t we coming to work to do our jobs and not to have fun just for the sake of fun?

Well, we know that fun unites people. And we know that fun can connect people. We also know that when people are having fun, they are lowering their barriers or defences — and we are creating psychological safety the more that’s happening. After all, it makes sense that if we are able to create an environment where people are able to not take themselves too seriously, then we are going to be allowing people to be more vulnerable. Feeling this way around colleagues, and it always being something positive, is going to building the safety of our work culture. So having fun leads to a healthier work environment.

Not only will we have a healthier work environment, we are going to be healthier ourselves, with all those awesome positive hormones racing around from the all the fun we’ve been having.

So it doesn’t feel too controversial to say that doing something to have fun is a very worthy investment to make.

People having fun building a snowman — playfulness, connection and flow.

But here’s the slightly trickier part; how can I inject fun into the workplace? We want it for the sake of it, for the benefits of it. So don’t fall into the trap of using it for teaching or understanding. Of course, it’s fine to do this as well, there’s no reason that learning can’t be fun, but it’s not going to be as powerful as allowing for fun without the learning angle.

Another trap to fall into would be setting aside time for ‘fun’. There’s nothing wrong with this as such but it’s no guarantee that fun will actually happen. Creating opportunities for fun to happen is a great start.

The most important thing that I’m taking away from this train of thought is, as a Scrum Master (or team lead or any other influential role), we have a power to make sure that fun is allowed, and encouraged. We are impediment removers; let’s remove things that are likely to block fun from flourishing. Let’s wait a bit longer when the team is joking around to say “alright let’s get back to it”. Let’s create an environment where there is a better balance all round.

Let’s have more fun.