From "The Right Not to Be Fun at Work/In a win for workplace dignity, a French high court recently decreed that businesses cannot force their employees to participate in supposedly enjoyable activities" (The New Yorker).
Can the capacity to have fun be made one of your professional responsibilities? It's one thing to be allowed to have fun or even encouraged to have fun or rewarded for bringing your delightful spirit of fun to the workplace. But it's quite another to fire you because you're no fun. But what is this "fun"? An employer's idea of fun can be distorted and burdensome. Isn't that what the TV show "The Office" is about? I don't know, I don't watch it, because I can't stand that sort of thing even vicariously.
From the article:
A U.K. company called the Fun Experts offers corporate rentals—air hockey, arcade machines, cotton-candy machines, human-size snow globes, rodeo sheep, egg-and-spoon races for team building—and a subscription service that supplies companies with monthly fun items, such as, say, a digital graffiti wall.
In “Fun at Work: How to Boost Creativity, Unleash Innovation, and Reinvent the Future of Work Using the Transformative Power of Play” (2022), David Thomas, the book’s co-author and “a scholar of fun” at the University of Denver, argues that “learning to goof around” can make employees more satisfied in their work and more supple in solving problems....
I'm not lazy. I'm supple!
Some people are more fun oriented than others, and some are no fun at all. To say they "are no fun" is to look at them from your point of view. What do you know of how they experience their own life? It may not be in terms of what you call fun. You're saying they don't contribute to the atmosphere you want. Maybe they are in pain, in mourning, depressed. Maybe they prefer profundities like religion and philosophy and art and you are the monster prodding them into a human-size snow globe and insisting that they harass a rodeo sheep.
Celebrate neurodiversity.
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Brilliant last line. Yes, neurodiversity has to count as much as all the other diversity stuff that is being catered to. Many people don't respond well to forced fun...they just try to endure it if it seems a requisite for keeping a job they want to keep.
Bartleby says, I would prefer not.
I've had enough team building cringe to last a lifetime. Exactly enough.
I retired last year. ;-)
"Can the capacity to have fun be made one of your professional responsibilities?"
It basically is for salarymen in Japan. And a source of great misery for many.
There should be a wall between your big corporate life and your personal life. Just like the separation between Church and State.
Some Nebraska state senator introduced a Bill for a moment of silence in public schools. The guy must be working for the ACLU as the State will be sued and lose.
"Harassing" the sheep is a gateway drug.
"We're deeply human"
You might be a wanker if...
"What is fun?"
Exactly.
I had a regional manager that retired. His normal work week was 60 to 80 hours a week. He retired but worked out a deal with the CFO to do special projects, analyzing data.
He would ask for something like, annual fuel usage, for the fleet of 150 liquid applicators, by model and and region. The CFO would ask how long it would take. If the retired manager said 100 hours, the CFO would triple it, pay him $9k. 10 days later the report would be on is desk.
The guy loved crunching data. What is fun? Ask this guy to do a touchy feely getaway, you wouldn't have to fire him, he would quit, rather than suffer such abuse.
Worst "forced-fun" experience of mine was a rah-rah management seminar when I was seated next to the CEO and we were directed to celebrate with a chest bump. I'm reserved already. He's Canadian. Awkward.
I once worked at a corporation where the owner/CEO loved Halloween. Employees, ( including management,) had elaborate costumes for a prize contest. A loud and intrusive display arrived vrd times n the lobby weeks beforehand. A parade across a two lane highway on the actual day,(we stopped traffic,) and an after-work party. Some, I suppose enjoyed them see. Not me, not many of the introverted engineers. Forced togetherness.
I was never any fun at work except for Fridays at 4 when management would send out for beer and pizza. I was Be Drunk.
"While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in"
At least corporate team building unites employees in their loathing of team building. It doesn't do much else.
I organized an afternoon "offsite" meeting for our group at Safeco Field (Seattle Mariners) once a year. We'd usually get about a dozen or so participants.
I see this as related to the “men are in trouble” post of yesterday. Both are consequences of the obliteration of the domestic sphere and family life that characterises our era. Yes, I know, I know, lots of people have families! But the uniqueness of this moment is the utter contempt our society shows for a robust domestic sphere. Women have abandoned the home, by and large, as a career. Those of us of a certain age can recall a time when the idea that Work must be endlessly fulfilling, must give us purpose and meaning, was greeted with prudent scepticism. The disappearance of the housewife, who tended to the small, hidden things that made for more grace filled days for her husband and children, are gone. Families don’t go to church anymore because Mom isn’t there to make it happen. She has to run errands and make lunch for a whole week. Home is just a drop point for consumer goods and services that have come to the “rescue” of harried, driven parents.
It's totally normal for an office to have a "culture," and the successful employees, especially the ones who want promotions, will fit into that culture. Cubik might be taking it to extremes such that a lot of perfectly capable employees won't fit in, but it's a difference of degree, not of type, from pretty much every other office out there.
If that's what they want, then the market itself will decide if they are not attracting enough of the right kind of employee.
Tim your argument could be expanded to cover torture. If that's what management wants right? I'm sure it won't take that long for the market to decide that torture isn't profitable. Couple of years at most.
Tim, "market"...
One might think so, but I believe there's legal precedent otherwise. Work-related vs. Non-work-related, etc.
Ah Team Building! Whenever we Americans joined the team in Sweden at the factory for meetings, the president of our group (an ex-pat American) liked to mix in at least one Team Building exercise during the visit. During a meeting in January one time early in my tenure with the company we traveled from Enkoping to Bro (both of those towns should have an umlaut over the o) and the weather was typical for central Sweden in the dark of winter, sub-zero (F) and snowy. Bill decided our Team Building event would be a traditional Swedish sauna, eight naked dudes steaming together: awkward.
To be fair, Bill had better ideas most of the time, like an afternoon racing each other at a hot-rod go-kart track. But he wanted us to experience Swedish culture a lot and I'll admit it stuck in my mind.
When my husband first started with his long term company the team building events were focused on the entire company. They were fun at first because people got to meet employees from other states/countries they had been working with but had never met in person. As the company grew such large events were unwieldy so the team building became focused on individual departments or groups. It also began to focus on team building between the company and the community.
Over the course of 20 plus years there were baseball games, bowling, boxing food for the hungry, boxing necessities for the homeless, cleaning the the beach, restoring multiple parks, etc. Other than the occasional sporting event it was all done during working hours.
My husband enjoyed these events and felt good about what they were accomplishing.
Team Building can be fun. But usually its just boring and forced.
The first thing that comes to mind when I read "deeply human" is deeply flawed. Is a prejudice I have to remind myself to resist.
You 'Be' Cubik?
So it's a black organization?
Tom Hanks' character in Big explored this idea. Where else could a kid in a man's body work, other than a toy company? He wouldn't last a day in a warehouse, it would kill his soul. Just like everyone else experiences.
Well, this is a tough one. They are a 'management consulting' company, who are generally all about interpersonal relationships. On the other hand, Cubik itself seems to be involved in 6 Sigma quality certification. That is a field full of statisticians, who can be rather disagreeable. 6 Sigma is not known to be a fun field: it's about measuring precisely how badly you're fucking up. The work is hard and you're going to be very unpopular with lots of people in the client's organization.
So, for Cubik's customers, which do you prefer: a chatty, drunk, promiscuous 6 Sigma facilitator who makes the customer feel OK about fucking up and doing better next time, or a glum, terse one?
I'm coming down on the side of the company here: Cubik is a paid "sin eater", and it's probably hard to keep good people who are also congenial to the customers. Gloomy Monsieur T. is going to have to find a job at a monastery counting defective angels on the heads of bent pins.
Ah- humor.
Any company that deals in customer service- like any retail store- should screen people for humor. If they dom't have a wide ranging sense of humor- don't hire. How to screen for this? Easy. Put the new applicants in a room. Since it's going to take an hour or so, pay them for their time. Sit them down, show the room an hour of assorted comedy. You can even use old stuff like Three Stooges and Burns and Allen. Video the room. Study afterwards. Anyone who isn't visibly enjoying the clips - don't hire.
I worked retail part time for over a decade. The worst employees I dealt with, the ones that brought down morale of those around them, were those you couldn't tell jokes around for fear of some way, some how, offending them. Ironically, many of those type were on the committess to set up store social functions and all employee meetings...
In other news...google lays off 12,000. Is there a connection between this thinking (if you can call it that)?
After 30 odd years, I've yet to see the point of teambuilding (unless it includes alcohol, betting, and/or throwing paintballs at people you don't like).
Begley: "There should be a wall between your big corporate life and your personal life."
True. I once dated a woman at the office but once we got married and started having kids, she quit the office and started working 18 hours a day at home.
A group of people work extra hard at work to meet a deadline or finish a huge project. Everyone works overtime, resulting in sacrifices such as less time with family, less sleep, no time for regular workouts or cooking healthy meals. An extra dose of coworker engagement that goes on far too long.
At the very end of it, once the project is done and deadline is met - the first thing my manager wants to do is - go out for drinks to celebrate finishing the project! I NEVER understood why a period of intense engagement with work is rewarded by - more engagement with work. How in the world can this be viewed as a reward rather than a punishment? Never understood that.
"stlcdr said...
In other news...google lays off 12,000."
That's a lotta team spirit to lose at once.
Oh God... This post brought to mind an interview my then-boyfriend, now my husband, and I had in a so-called "fun pub" in the outskirts of London. The interviewer was eager to hire a couple of young Americans (in retrospect it's not clear that he had ever actually met an American), but he wanted to know whether we were (here I must recreate the quote; it's been a long time) "the kind of people who will jump onto the tabletops and dance."
Now, we needed jobs. We did our best to convince the guy that we were those kinds of Americans. But we got out of that interview, immediately turned to each other, and said more or less in unison, "Please, let us not get that job!"
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