By: Bill Neill, Chief Operations Officer & Co-founder of Carex Consulting Group
Every Sunday night for years I would get a feeling in the pit of my stomach. I thought that was just work until I found my happy place at Carex. What was different?
At Carex we have 3 core tenants: Care, Be Real and Have Fun! Why should fun be a central focus? Besides lowering healthcare costs, people who have fun are more productive, more creative, and collaborate freely on multifaceted problems. They have more patience with customers and find win-win solutions easily.
Million-dollar question: how do you build a culture where work is fun? The news isn’t good for the quick fix DIYer! Readers may have seen workplaces where a lactation closet or a company paid happy hour is supposed to magically solve all of staff’s woes. Much in the same way you can’t transform from a couch potato to an elite triathlete by having a salad for lunch today, the result is obtained from a myriad of small choices done right and with consistency. While definitions of fun vary widely, I boil it down to a few core pillars: meaning, openness, and humor.
Meaning – It’s not fun to come to work when you feel like a cog in a machine. Staff needs to understand where the team is going and how they play a pivotal role in getting there. Everyone on the team is a critical player; otherwise the company wouldn’t take on the enormous expense of paying them, covering benefits, outfitting desks, etc. Make sure staff feels connected to the mission. Take every opportunity to point out how their individual work made a difference to one customer. Tell stories and anecdotes; invite staff to gather stories of their own about helping a teammate or a customer.
Openness – Opaque promotions, hidden financials and closed doors make people feel like they’re acting a part instead of genuinely surrounded by a supportive community. Not everything can be shared, but anything that can be, should be! Staff doesn’t have to agree with the decision, but they should know why it was made. Openness connects us to the mission, and fosters trust between staff and company. We need to feel comfortable and supported before we can have fun.
Humor – Now we’re talking about fun. Humor cuts the tension; it makes hard conversations easier. A leader who is the butt of their own jokes is approachable. So many offices are afraid of humor because we might get sued! When people feel valued, connected to the mission and comfortable speaking up if a joke touched a nerve; humor is aloe on a sunburn. Why not send a funny meme about a deal that we lost? People will do it anyway! It’s a way to signal that our failures are ok and part of being human. It’s how we say, “meh we did our best and came up short. It hurts but I’m still standing.”