Fun is a fickle thing. Everyone inherently knows what fun is, but if you had to define fun at the workplace, it would not be as easy as it first sounds. Looking up the definition of fun will also get you reprimanded by the dictionary, and there is no one sure way to define it. The only sure thing is that if the most interesting thing at the office on the first day is the photocopier, the new employee getting the tour will probably start looking for another job during the lunch break.
The overall feeling of fun at the workplace impacts productivity. And so it’s
a topic without any specific bullet points, but a topic to think about and discuss nonetheless.
If you want to have fun at the workplace but can’t manage to play chess
on one screen while maintaining your focus on coding… or your keyboard shortcut hand is also your balloon tying and juggling hand… you will probably need to interact with other people eventually. But there is only a limited level of friendship and camaraderie that you can build with people when talking about code and sending each other design files.
When was the last time someone asked a different water cooler question than: ’’So, how was the weekend/any plans for the weekend?’’ In most agencies, it has probably been a while. And that’s expected. If you work in a consistent and focused environment, there are only so many topics that can come to mind.
But if you change up the setting, if you do different activities together, you might build more than just classic coworker bonds. You might build friendships. And what could be nicer than looking forward to Monday morning at the office to see your friends?
But not everyone comes to work looking for friendship. Especially top performers who just want to put on their headphones and forget that they are in an office environment.
Sadly headphones run out of battery, the wifi goes down, and progress meetings exist. Eventually, even the most focused people have to talk to their coworkers. And since you spend most of your day at work, people would prefer to cut down on the dry, corporate jargon and instead discuss or do something… fun.
This again brings us to the topic of shared values. The job of a back-end developer and the job of a UX designer require different personalities. So if your agency wants to have a varied offering of skills and backgrounds, you will have to find values that connect with every group.
But not just the ’’standard’’ values that are put on the agency “about us” page. The values that make up the constantly evolving personality of your agency. If you do this, you will eventually have an agency full of like minded individuals that don’t need to act corporate 24/7 and might even joke around from time to time.
Sadly, there is a thin line between having fun at the workplace and being overly quirky and disrupting everyone’s work. Unfortunately, you can also never get full value-alignment with every person that has been hired. But an agency where people think of each other as nothing more than colleagues and only spend time together at work is an agency that will have trouble scaling and keeping up with the more friendly teams later on.
Your culture and environment both have an impact on the quality of your work.