Is “Fun at Work” an Oxymoron?

I have vivid memories about three very different and very serious discussions about fun at work:

1. A meeting to craft our team mission statement for a service team and my visceral reaction when someone wanted to include, as part of our mission, to have fun. My gut reaction: Work is work. Fun is goofing around, unproductive and a possible reason to be fired. I pushed back, which resulted in much discussion. Net result: Fun did not make the mission statement. But, the idea of fun at work enters my consciousness.
2. A manufacturing department meeting, several years later, in which we were brainstorming ways in which we might bring more fun into the workplace, as pressrooms are notoriously not much fun. I was amazed and then dismayed, as the prevailing wisdom was that the only way to have fun at work was to “make fun” of others. Folks were perplexed at how, now that pranks at the expense of others, hazing, and harassment were prohibited, that they might have fun at work.
3. My husband’s welcome speech to a crew of 30 staff members for his new business venture. Being an exile from the corporate world, memories of work that was not fun was still fresh in his psyche. He spoke sincerely about the need to have fun at work. He was adamant about the need to move on and find something that was fun. Funny thing (or not so funny after all) was that this new business quickly headed south and was anything but fun. Three years later we can say it’s really hard to move on when it is your baby, fun or not.

It seems to me that describing fun at work shares the same lexiconic challenge that non-Eskimos have with snow. (Conventional wisdom tells us that Eskimos have over 100 different words for snow – and we non-Eskimos have far less.) What is fun at work? Is it possible? Can we call if fun or do we need to call it something else?

Turns out, Jonathon Winter has done extensive global study on fun in the workplace and has created taxonomy of 21 types of fun that one might experience in the workplace. They include Fellowship, Application of Ability, Altruism, Discovery, Humor, Problem Solving, Completion, Creation, Challenge, Power, Love, Immersion, Expression, Narrative, Reflection, Sensation, Danger, Completion, Imagination, Physical Activity, and Submission.

I’m not quite that academically inclined or nearly that thorough or inclined to study this in great detail. I am, though, based on a sample size of one (that would be me), able to report on what makes work fun (for me that is). It’s great fun to:

• Do something you are really good at most of the time
• Work with people that are both friends and co-workers
• Achieve a challenging goal
• Take some time to kick back and relax with co-workers, either in or out of the office
• Do something that makes a real difference for someone else
• Laugh at yourself (plenty of material there)
• Work surrounded by others striving for excellence
• Work in a new environment
• Crack a few jokes
• See the humor in the things that challenge you to your core (a bit of gallows humor)
• Reminisce about how much fun past projects, teams and work were, when the hard reality was that at the time you wondered if you were going to live through them
• Add a new skill or try something new
• Find opportunities to belly laugh sometimes

I’m curious – what is fun for you at work?