Career Tips >> Browse Articles >> Work-Life Balance

Why Fun at Work Matters

Excerpt from “The Levity Effect: Why It Pays to Lighten Up”

If people are having fun, they’re going to work harder, stay longer, maintain their composure in a crisis and take better care of the organization. Here’s one example.

An excited Kirt Womack of the Thiokol factory in Utah sprinted into his manager’s office on the first day of spring and asked if the folks on the factory floor could do something fun – say, head outside and fly paper airplanes – if they met their quota two hours early. The manager wrinkled his brow and vetoed the idea. Kirt persisted, “Well, then, what if we exceed our quota by 50 percent?” Figuring he had nothing to lose, the manager finally gave in.

Later that day, at 1:30, the manager checked on things and found that his employees had reached 110 percent of their quota. By 3 p.m., they’d surpassed 150 percent. The airplanes were launched, laughter rang out and people frolicked (funny word, frolicked).

This tale is no big deal, right? Sure, except for the fact that a 50 percent increase isn’t exactly insignificant. While this tale illustrates the benefits of levity at work, it also underscores the dire need to enlighten management. You should know what the supervisor’s initial reaction was to his workers’ hitting the 150 percent production goal by 3 p.m. Rather than connecting the dots and seeing the link between the promise of fun and working harder, he instead commented, “Imagine what you guys could have accomplished if you hadn’t taken two hours off to screw around!”

The manager’s initial ignorance did little to dissuade the workers. The kind of joyous, playful, break-the-tension fun they engaged in is taking place all around the world in organizations that care about performance, retention and profitability. Motivated purely by the opportunity to have a little fun at work, the aviation workers increased their performance dramatically. The next week they negotiated for a volleyball game on the factory floor as a reward and again hit record production levels. Each week, they continued to request fun rewards and turned in astounding production numbers. By the third week, when they had earned a trip offsite for ice cream cones, the manager finally got it.

That, in a waffle cone, is the power of the Levity Effect at work.

An increasing body of research demonstrates that when leaders lighten up and create a fun workplace, there is a significant increase in the level of employee trust, creativity and communication – leading to lower turnover, higher morale and a stronger bottom line.

The research also shows that managers who have taught themselves to be funnier are more effective communicators and better salespeople, have more engaged employees, earn a lot more than their peers and are much thinner. OK, maybe not the last one.