The Serious Business Of Real Fun

Bring The Fun

For about 10 to 15 minutes a day at my current gig, the people in my office get, well, there's no other word to describe it.

Goofy. We get seriously goofy.

We pull out Nerf guns and blaze away at each other -- having made significant personal investments of time and money in the gear we use to peg each other. A growing percentage of the office play on the foosball table, with increasingly over the top trash talk adding to the festivities. (My go-to phrase when trying to coax the ball away from an opponent, because I am of that age: "Come to Butthead.") On summer Friday afternoons when we close up shop a few hours early, I've pulled out a putter and putting green and tried to make shots from 100 feet of long hallway carpet away. This week, there's going to be a Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament, and I'm leaving out other details, because, well, this isn't a laundry list. There is, in fact, an entire committee based around Fun. It's also a continuing scandal to my children that I am a part of that group.

By Silicon Valley standards, none of this is particularly startling or over the top. We have no gaming consoles, don't use office computers for serious timewaste, and even in the most raucous of moments, you can always pop in headphones and grind away to your heart's content. Even the most distractable among us seems to be desk-bound for the vast majority of our day, and the foolishness is contained to more or less break or meal times.

But by the standards of the more traditional industry that we inhabit, all of this is kind of a big deal, and the occasional reactions that I get from people who work elsewhere tell me this isn't very common. I've also worked at a number of martech companies where this level of seeming frivolity was matched or surpasssed, but actually, not quite, because the underlying current of the place weren't, well, in any way fun.

Fun in the office is, at its core, something that comes from the top, spread by an actual fondness among groups and people, and something you just can't fake. When your CEO is speeding along to a meeting on a scooter, that might seem fun... but when they are going fast as a matter of showy athleticism or efficiency to get somewhere quicker, that kind of kills the purpose. When there's an after-work happy hour where people aren't talking about work, that's fun. When it's a frat-level test of tolerance to see who can pitch ideas while sloshed, it's not.

This all seems like something that should be obvious at an HR or leadership level, but the nature of business is that you are not always going to have the right people in those positions, or a company that's going to work out in the long run. If your top people are insecure about their role or the direction of the company, fun becomes just another way to show those problems. When they believe in the direction and are comfortable in their skin, you get heartfelt compliments on your foosball game from the execs, without a moment of snark over how much time you may have wasted in your life to get those skills. (To be honest, many, many hours. And as an aside, any marketing pro that wants to get something out of their engineering team should learn to play foosball, at least to a level of tolerable. It pays off in spades.)

So the question really isn't whether or not your company has fun at the office. Because every company claims that now, because every company knows that fun in the office is critical to reducing turnover and keeping morale up.

More accurately, it's this: how many people are faking it?

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