Work Hard, Play Hard: How Fun Provides Balance
With so much serious stuff going on in the world and at work, there’s a role for playfulness in our jobs to serve as a counterbalance. This is not to say that the work shouldn’t be treated with all appropriate seriousness, just that a lighthearted attitude might reduce the intensity of the demands and pressures.
By playfulness, I don’t mean formal, scheduled timeouts in the workday for everyone to get together and blow bubbles (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I’m thinking, instead, of random little things that can lighten the mood and get people laughing.
I asked some colleagues for examples of things they do at work to promote levity. A project manager said that for some of the team’s weekly meetings, each team member brings in a favorite cartoon of the week and puts it in a bag. When they’re moving from one agenda item to the next, someone pulls out one of the cartoons and reads it, and everyone tries to guess who brought it.
A team leader told me the members of his team created secret hand signals and facial expressions to communicate among themselves. A software engineer said team members brought in outlandish hats and wore them at a meeting. He said doing this often could get old quickly, but the laughs generated by doing it once in a while are worth it.
One of my own favorites to lighten the mood is to have each team member write three words, one each on a slip of paper, and put all the slips of paper in a bag. Then someone randomly draws out three to five words and everyone has a few minutes to write a silly paragraph using the selected words. You can, if you want, identify a theme for the paragraph, such as ways to cope with our peskiest customers or how to explain our latest missed deadline. People become highly creative, and laughter reigns when they each read out their paragraph.
It’s important not to do anything in the name of playfulness that would make some people uncomfortable. Having everyone dress up for Halloween may appeal to some people, but others are likely to hate the idea. Fortunately, there are plenty of ideas to choose from.
Playfulness research—yes, there is such a thing—has found that people who exhibit high levels of playfulness, such as by being spontaneous and lighthearted, seem to be better at coping with stress. Of course, this research is in its infancy, and the reality could be just the reverse—that people who cope better with stress are able to be more playful. Either way, it’s worth keeping in mind the famous words of playwright George Bernard Shaw: "We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."
