The economy, or at least some facets of it, must finally be recovering. Recently, for the first time in a long time, I was asked about designing “fun” into a workplace.
My response: “fun is problematic.”
Intentionally creating a space that’s fun is different from trying to develop a place that’s pleasant to work in and where work actually gets done. I’m all for pleasant, high-performance spaces, and those are the ones that get discussed in this column all the time.
“Fun” is in the mind of the experiencer – and what one person views as fun is probably not categorized that way by too many – or maybe any – of the people they share a space with. The sort of fun that generally gets worked into workplaces is stuff that the person on the client side who’s making decisions thinks is fun, or thinks other people think is fun, so the “fun” selections made are unlikely to please a majority of users. Anyone encountering them will know how they’re supposed to respond to the “fun” elements, but public chortles are not private “hurrahs.” It’s important to remember, also, that research consistently shows that management types don’t know too much about the thoughts, moods and cultures of their employees.
Individuals under pressure also come to resent “fun” workplace elements that they decide, for whatever reason, make it more difficult for them to perform to their full potential. Fun may encumber their work, for example, if noise from people playing pool prevents them from concentrating – even in the places their employer has provided for work requiring focused thought.
Two researchers, Baldry and Hallier, studied workplace fun, and their findings are important for people trying to add fun to spaces. Their “analysis suggests that management’s attempts to determine what is deemed fun may not only be resented by workers because it intrudes on their existing private identities but also because it seeks to reshape their values and expression.”
Baldry and Hallier discuss two different sorts of workplace “fun.” In “Knowledge Work is Fun” mode, work areas attempt to communicate “youthfulness (and not necessarily chronological age – the ‘inner child’ crops up a lot in this kind of discourse), creativity, collaboration and autonomy.” The goal here is to spur important and creative thinking, but that goal is seldom achieved.
The second approach to fun is labeled “The Job May Be Boring But We Can Have a Laugh” by Baldry and Hallier. When it is employed, the work done by users is often fairly predictable, and “the fun environment is more a strategy for encouraging the right emotional mind set in the context of an alienated job.” One of planners’ goals is often that employees in these “fun” spaces will have more upbeat conversations with customers, for example, and that that will have positive repercussions for a firm’s bottom line. Baldry and Hallier conclude that “even the wackiest of work surroundings cannot…despite the managerial hopes placed in it, is disguise…or ameliorate the daily reality of an essentially alienated labour process.”
It’s always a good idea to communicate organizational culture in a workplace – that helps people interviewing for jobs at a company or doing business with it, or working there – understand how things really get done there. A slide or a foosball table or something else in a space may help send desired signals. A pool table may say, for example, “People who work here can expect to be treated like employees in Silicon Valley where pool tables are common.” A slide may say, “We’re great at understanding what children want to do and creating toys they love” or, “We’re not too formal a group.” Signaling is very different from trying to create a fun workplace, however.
Fun is problematic, and may be destructive, at least when people try to add it explicitly to a workplace.
Chris Baldry and Jerry Hallier. 2010. “Welcome to the House of Fun: Work Space and Social Identity.” Economic and Industrial Democracy, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 150-172.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.