Management by fun - using play to boost morale and motivation

Nation's Business, Jan, 1990 by Charles A. Jaffe

Management By Fun

In the fall of 1987, Physio-Control Inc. was playing catch-up. The Redmond, Wash., company--an Eli Lilly Corp. subsidiary that makes heart monitors and defibrillators--had fallen behind schedule because it had overhauled its production methods. As a result, workers were in jeopardy of losing performance bonuses, and tensions were running high.

It was time "for a little levity to break the tension," says Les Tiffany, the company's director of production. "We tossed around a lot of ideas, all pretty outrageous, before settling on one."

With his boss's approval, Tiffany dressed up like a clown one day, mounted a child's tricycle, and pedaled through Physio-Control's 300,000-square-foot facility, towing a little red wagon that carried a siren and a banner announcing production of $500,000 worth of goods. For three months, every $500,000 in finished goods meant a tricycle ride through the plant by one of the company's more than 40 managers--always a volunteer--dressed as a clown, or a swashbuckler, an elf, or Santa Claus. The siren sent workers rushing to the "parade route" to see the "lucky" manager, halting production for up to 10 minutes in each work area as often as three times a day.

"It was maximum disruption," Tiffany says, "but that was the plan. Management here wasn't afraid to have a little fun. And in spite of the commotion and the stoppages, we did work to our limits; we easily exceeded our goals."

A number of management experts are convinced that all work and no play makes employees unhappy and unproductive. Though it's not a widespread management tool, putting a measure of fun and humor in the workplace, many say, can increase employee loyalty, productivity, and enthusiasm for the job, which in turn can help a company deal with increasing competition and demands for productivity.

"If there is a pleasant feeling while you work, you're less aware of the effort you are putting in," says Renn Zaphiropoulos, former president of a California-based printer manufacturer, Versatec Inc., and now a management consultant in Utah. "I call it manageable anxiety, the state in which fun works best. Design the situation so workers are captured by an intrigue. Give them a challenge--a big effort, but not impossible--and they'll be anxious to achieve their goal. Let them have fun and maybe show their personality, and they'll love the work and do it well."

Companies that employ a management-by-fun strategy are often in highly competitive industries where workers are almost constantly under pressure to perform. Fun relieves tension, managers say, while the demands of the job ensure that levity doesn't deteriorate into unproductive goofing off. Fun should be constructive, experts add, and it should never be demeaning or offensive.

The definition of fun, of course, depends largely on who's defining it. For example, the story is widely told that Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft Corp., has said that one of the best ways to have fun is to write computer programs.

Enjoyable work is not the only ingredient in fun, however. Executives at companies that either allow or encourage employee fun say it requires creation of a certain atmosphere. Correctly done, these managers say, fun is distinct from goofing off. Maintaining that difference often requires that the fun--though usually spontaneous for workers--is planned and run by the company's top managers and is not allowed to get out of hand. In short, managing by fun is serious business.

The management-by-fun approach is relatively new. The traditional view--that work means work, and fun gets in the way--has long been ingrained in management philosophy.

George H. Labovitz, a Boston University professor of organizational behavior and management, customarily shows his students that in all 2,281 pages of the 1922 edition of The Management Handbook, only one page is devoted to the subject of morale. That page, he explains, "says employers should create athletic teams so that energy generated on the field can carry into the workplace."

Labovitz, who also heads a Burlington, Mass., quality-improvement consulting firm called ODI Inc., says: "That was the 1922 approach to fun; keep it out of the office, and hope the benefits of having fun--namely good morale--trickle in. A lot of old-school managers still believe--more than 65 years later--that fun doesn't belong in the office."

David Abramis, an organizational psychologist and professor of management at California State University, Long Beach, has studied office fun and says it often requires a complete change in corporate culture. Although management by fun is no substitute for a person enjoying his or her work, when fun is correctly instilled in the working environment, it creates "a higher quality of life," he says.

"You don't just decide to make work fun, any more than you'd change your bonus system," says Abramis. "You have to decide how fun fits in with everthing from your benefits plan to your performance-appraisal system. It needs top-management support and can't be mandated or forced. But if it fits into your system, fun is a very positive addition to the workplace."