"Bottom-line" Culture vs. a Healthy One?

In Fun Works: Creating Places Where People Love to Work (second edition), author Leslie Yerkes debunks the myth that fun and profitability are mutually exclusive - and I couldn't agree more.

After all, generally, people spend more time at work than at any other single activity in their lives, yet most companies feel that employees having fun while working is at best a sign of a lack of commitment to their jobs; at worst a down-right detriment to the business' bottom-line. It's unprofessional and counterproductive, they claim! Horse hockey, as Col. Potter in MASH would say.

The key is not whether the two can be integrated, but how well your company trains/encourages staff, through its culture, to fully enjoy what they do as the direct means to improved profits.  Since the 1990's, research has clearly shown that when people love their jobs and get great value out of their work experience, productivity and profits are up while turn-over and burn-out are down.

In fact, I recommend organizations consciously use fun as a cultural expectation, because it will increase employee and customer retention/relations, motivate individuals/teams, and ultimately improve overall productivity.

Yerkes details precisely how eleven  companies the likes of Southwest Airlines and Prudential Insurance integrate fun into the normal course of their businesses' operations, based upon the following principles:

• Give permission to perform in whatever way works for the employee
• Challenge your own biases
• Capitalize on creative spontaneity
• Create great processes and then trust them
• Value a diversity of styles
• Expand boundaries
• Encourage authenticity
• Be unafraid to make room for many choices
• Hire good people and get out of their way
• Embrace expansive thinking and risk taking
• Celebrate successes regularly, and "catch people doing things right" rather than wrong

In this second edition, Yerkes conducted follow-up interviews with the original eleven companies from the first edition to see if they've managed to maintain a prosperous and fun environment in the face of a recession and national turmoil.

And not surprisingly, she discovered that all have continued to thrive, not one of them was undone by having a culture of "fun and work," and that, if anything, the combined emphasis on high profitability with a healthy, positive culture didn't just keep them in business, but was the source of their growth.

Here's just a few of the enormous benefits Yerkes found by aligning work with fun:

• Stimulated creativity and innovation
• Commitment and ownership at all levels of the organizational chart
• High employee morale (by among other things, countering the effects of stress and decreasing burn-out)
• Enhanced productivity
• Reduced conflicts and improved conflict resolution
• Reduced absenteeism
• Stronger and longer-lasting customer relationships

Creating places where people love to work while retaining the goal of increased revenues requires creating a culture where individuals can freely bring the best of themselves to work each day (that is what you hired, is it not?). 

So get to it - in this economy this is just the edge you need to not just survive, but thrive!