Fun is mandatory | Fish Percolator

Is "I'm too busy to have fun" really the most professional approach as a leader?

This is a blog version of a talk I gave today at Queer in Tech Leeds. Thanks so much to Queer in Tech for having me! If you are in the area and you missed it, I’d really recommend signing up for future events!

Forced fun!

The title of this post is “Fun is mandatory”. This phrasing might strike fear into your heart!

When we think of “forced fun”, we think of so-called “team-building exercises”, like:

We’re going to match you with people you’ve never met. Now, build a freestanding tower using only paper straws and sticky tape. Highest one wins!

These kinds of exercises feel very corporate, slightly sinister and — most likely — not actually fun at all.

The good news: in this blog post I’m talking about actually having fun at work. You spend a third of your day there every weekday, so why shouldn’t that time be enjoyable?

Does fun slow teams down?

As leaders, we’re always trying to eliminate obstacles to productivity. And the social conditioning we receive tells us that if people are having fun at work, that’s time they could be heads down working.

So adding too much fun into a team maybe has a knock-on effect to productivity?

That’s not how productivity works when you’re using your brains all the time. You don’t magically produce more stuff by spending more time at your desk… much as we hate to admit it, people have a finite amount of creativity to give in a day.

But when you’re enjoying work and morale in your team is high, have you noticed how much more - and how much better - work you produce in the same timeframe? And also how much less likely it is to contain errors that need revisiting?

If you’re having fun, tasks that would otherwise seem boring now seem completely doable.

Fun in a remote team

There’s a secret additional reason why the fun agenda is so essential when teams have remote workers.

Every team has members who opt out: opt out of fun, opt out of talking about their personal lives, opt out of face-to-face meetings. Anything at all to get their heads down and do solo work.

But if you let that mentality go on too long, these team members can start forgetting their coworkers are humans; forgetting that everyone is on the same side. They’ll start interacting with their colleagues the same way they might with a customer service line they’re upset with, or with trolls on the internet.

You’ve probably heard this line: “This could have been an email” - usually about a meeting your colleague thinks was trivial and could have been solved asynchronously. I disagree - not every meeting can be an email. Being part of a team is a human activity and it sometimes requires human connection if you want everyone to treat each other with patience, empathy and respect.

And what better way to build human connection than with a little fun.

Types of fun

Fun doesn’t just mean scheduled activities. There are many kinds of fun you can introduce to a workplace and in my experience you need a mix of all of these: some team members will respond more to one type than to the others.

Just chat

The most traditional kind of office fun is idle chatter. People just walking to each other’s desks and talking about whatever.

Maybe they’re talking about a show they’re watching, or what they did at the weekend. Maybe they’ve got some gossip about the latest company direction. Maybe there’s praise for a colleague’s work.

It’s important to ensure this kind of ad hoc communication is encouraged, because it’s often a huge source of unexpected “unblocking” moments, either because the colleague is distracted into doing some subconscious work or because something about the conversation jogs their memory.

I’ve found one way to encourage idle chatter is to have a weekly checkin meeting that doesn’t have too much structure. Of course there should be work topics during this meeting (otherwise the “head down” people won’t show up) but leave plenty of place for people to go off-script and talk about their interests and personal lives if they want to.

In a remote team, you won’t have the casual moving to each other’s desks so it’s important to make sure there are text channels in your collaboration software where constant chatter is encouraged.

I really like an approach I call “narrate your life” (I might do another blog post about this one day) where it’s common practice for people to be constantly talking about what they’re up to in text channels, and for managers to offer help and support if people are silent for too long.

Games and activities

The most traditional kind of “office fun” and perhaps the most controversial (without justification, in my opinion) is dedicated time specifically for activities that are fun and don’t, in themselves, advance the team’s goals. Not everyone will come to these but some people thrive in this environment.

I’m a board game fan, and there are loads of options for board games that can be played remotely, from Board Game Arena but also Codenames, Skribbl, Gartic Phone, Geoguessr and many more. (I’ll do a full blog post about my favourites sometime!)

But as well as games there are many more activities you could schedule in during the course of a sprint at work, including:

“Lunch & learn” sessions
Film clubs
Team meals

and many more such ideas. Sometimes it’s fun to do a workshop just to find out what kind of fun your team wants to have!

Work-like fun

Some fun can be indistinguishable from work apart from that it’s more enjoyable. This is the kind of fun that also contributes to your business goals!

Some examples of work-like fun I’ve seen work really well include:

and my personal favourite: firebreaks.

A firebreak is where you dedicate an entire sprint to side-projects, ideally team activities rather than solo ones. For a firebreak to not feel like a total downing of tools, the side-projects should have some sort of business impact, but in reality they can be completely wacky and not really ever going to make it to production.

Typically, during a firebreak, people learn new skills or unblock some other less fun piece of work as a kind of unintentional consequence. Or their firebreak project will become a kind of cultural touchstone in future, more serious, conversations.

Power hours

Sometimes this concept is called “body doubling” but that term is taken from the ADHD community and I prefer the term “power hour” since it isn’t appropriating disability culture.

The idea behind a power hour is that people spend time working in each other’s company. This could be in a meeting room, or on a video call with cameras and microphones on.

During a power hour, people don’t need to chat, but chat might naturally occur as people make the inevitable grunts or swear words.

The basic philosophy here is that knowing someone else is present while you work can have a huge impact on productivity, and on morale, even for non-disabled team members.

Weekly mini-fun

This one is perhaps the simplest one of all to implement, and maybe all it really needs from leaders is a culture shift to ensure that people know it’s OK to do this.

When I worked at Citizens Advice, we had a weekly collaborative playlist where team members would vote on a theme each week and then people would add songs that meet that theme. It was a great way to learn your colleagues’ musical tastes … and for me to force Kate Bush onto everyone.

Another thing we did was the Friday quiz. Quizmasters were chosen from a rota and then they’d find time during the week to come up with a 5-question quiz that could be asked, answered and awarded within the space of a 15-minute meeting, towards the end of Friday. People were able to get very creative with this quiz, even in spite of the time constraints!

Make fun recurring

Something I’ve seen over and over again is that people have a great idea for something fun; the event happens and is a resounding success; and then it never happens again.

This isn’t great for morale in the long-term, because it makes fun seem like something that can only happen when the time is right.

My tip for this: make everything a recurring event. Right from the first instance.

When I was at British Red Cross, I introduced an hour of board games every week. A whole hour! But the impact on the team’s wellbeing and productivity was worth it at the time.

The inevitable drop-off

No matter how hard you try, these fun initiatives inevitably seem to drop off in attendance and eventually vanish from the calendar. And I think I know why…

Leaders. Tech leads, product managers, whoever. Leaders endorse and support fun initiatives when they’re first created; usually during a quiet time when there’s space to think about this.

But then things get busy. Leaders’ own leaders start breathing down their necks for things to be delivered on time. They feel they’re letting people down if they don’t press on with critical stuff. They look at their calendar for any time they can claw back… anything at all. Then the inevitable “Do I have to go to board games or power hour this week?” … And then they decline the event.

But here’s the thing. No matter how psychologically safe we make our work environments, the wider culture of society tells us that having fun at work is slacking off. Having fun is reneging on our responsibilities as paid employeers.

And, so, we go to the fun things when our leaders go to the fun things. But, when our leaders start skipping them, we feel more acutely that this is “slacking off”. And we stop going too.

And then it’s over. The invite still sites in the calendar, week after week. Someone will dutifully “cancel it because we’re all too busy” each week. The leaders know it’s important, so they don’t delete it. But no one goes any more.

Morale, team health… and eventually productivity. They all start to drop along with the forgotten promise of fun at work.

Repeat this mantra

This only happens because leaders see the fun stuff as optional. That if they have to squeeze something out of their day, it’s the fun that goes.

But fun isn’t optional. You find ways to reprioritise your work when there are too many mandatory things to do. So why can’t fun be one of the mandatory things?

Please, repeat this mantra:

Fun is mandatory

Fun. Is. Mandatory.

(at least for leaders.)

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Fish Percolator is a technical leadership consultancy based in Yorkshire.

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