CHAPTER 15

Mixing Fun and Business

Are you unhappy with your job? Do you feel like your manager doesn’t respect you? Do you feel like the CEO has no clue about what’s going on at your level in the company? If so, you’re not alone.

So many workers imagine the “perfect” work environment and strictly affix their notion of happiness to that ideal. They make the pinnacle of happiness and well-being contingent upon how well their current job lines up with the model that they’ve created in their mind.

A recent Gallup survey found that only about one-third of US employees consider themselves engaged at work. This means that about two-thirds could care less — or are even hostile — about the work they’re doing and the company they’re working for. It’s even worse outside the United States, with over 80 percent of employees in the disengaged category. Yet companies with highly engaged workforces outperform competitors by 147 percent.

Each year, Fortune magazine enlists the aid of the Great Place to Work Institute to compile the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For^® list. Companies covet and seek membership in this rare group. Talk about a recruiting boost! For all employees who work for the companies on the list, the phrase “this is a fun place to work” most highly correlated among all survey statements with this phrase: “Taking everything into account, I consider this a great place to work.”

Translation: if you want a workplace that attracts and retains top talent, make it a fun place to work. And if you want to love your work, find a way to infuse moments of fun into your day.

It’s Not about Satisfaction

In a long list of the wonderful aspects of your job, odds are there’s at least one annoying sliver in your pinkie finger that’s making you rethink your career choices. As an employee, you ride a roller coaster of emotions fueled by the Culture of WISH. It says, “Someday, hopefully, the perfect workday will land on your lap and nuzzle you like a kitten. In the meantime, buck up! Just put your head down and plow ahead. That’s how your forefathers’ forefathers built this land, after all.”

By sacrificing immediate fun in the hopes of getting some joy down the line, you’re falling victim to fallacy. Here’s a little secret that you may not be aware of: everybody does stuff that they don’t want to do at work.

I’m sure there are plenty of readers of this book who would say they love their job but can find something about it they despise. My nemesis? Editing. Yuck.* While we can occasionally delegate portions of job ugliness, for neither you nor me is there such a thing as the 100 percent perfect job. If we sit around waiting for the perfect job to throw us the keys and “have a good time,” we’re always going to feel as if we’re being cheated.

However, the Culture of WIN creates a different reality. It gives us the right to predetermined breaks that we can use to step away, regardless of the experiences that we may be having at the moment. Whether we’re happy or unhappy with our job is irrelevant. The point is that we can take these breaks to make sure that it is always worth it now. That it will be worth it each day, week, month, and year.

In this way, we can be happy at work regardless of externalities. As the Dalai Lama once said: “If you have fear of some pain or suffering, you should examine whether there is anything you can do about it. If you can, there is no need to worry about it; if you cannot do anything, then there is also no need to worry.” Translation: you can do something about your happiness at work, so there’s no need to worry.

Who bears responsibility for making these changes? In my experience, and with a nonscientific estimate, here is how I see the “fun responsibility” divvied up in the workplace. Enjoy this tasty pie chart on the next page:

That big fat slice says that you are mostly in control of your workplace happiness. No need to sit around waiting for someone to swoop down from the heavens and save the day.

A Different Kind of Oasis

In a workday context, it’s helpful to look at meaningful breaks in terms of productivity. And in the land of meaningful breaks, the concept of ultradian rhythm is king.

The what rhythm? You’ve likely heard of the circadian rhythm, which is the biological flow of the day, typically applied to optimal sleep/awake cycles. The ultradian rhythm is a clever chronobiology term for a cycle that repeats many times in a day. We have a variety of ultradian rhythms, from heart rate to body-temperature regulation to appetite to even nostril dilation. You read that right.

In a workplace context, you have an optimal cycle for how long you can work until you need to take a break. Noted sleep researcher, Nathaniel Kleitman, gets credit for discovering the “basic rest-activity cycle.” He first found that we have ultra-dian rhythms within our sleep cycle. Then he revealed that the same pattern extends into our day.

Each person has an optimal cycle for how long they can work until needing a break — or Work Oasis. Just as each person has unique nightly sleep needs,** a person’s Work Oasis needs vary from around ninety minutes to two hours per ultradian cycle.

Translation: if you’re a person who needs a break every ninety minutes, then when you push past the ninety-minute mark and fail to take your needed break, every minute thereafter gives you a diminishing return. However, by taking a quick Oasis break, you give your body room to reset your clock, recharge your internal battery, and return to optimal levels of performance.

Amazing, right? The key is to find your optimal workplace ultradian rhythm and then build a schedule that supports it. The fastest way to find your unique workday ultradian rhythm is through — you guessed it — experimentation!

Start with taking a ten-minute break every ninety minutes for two weeks and see how it affects your workday. Then try one-hundred-minute intervals and evaluate your performance. Continue to adjust the time period of your breaks between ninety and one hundred twenty minutes until you find your workplace ultradian rhythm.

SELF-DEFINED FUN

Which brings us back to personal responsibility. You can create a “pause that refreshes” every workday. You need not be dependent on the table scraps of time pushed into your dish that some corporate overlord approves from on high.

In fact, that’s often part of the problem.

These days, companies push “fun” programs that the leader at the top of the food chain believes will be a “killer time.” Despite their best intentions, executives too often provide something to their employees that will, in fact, make them — the executives — happy.

The CEO may establish a corporate golf day. But what if a third of the company workforce despises golf? See the problem? In the end, programs such as these are all about them and their definition of what an Oasis is. The real power of having fun is when employees have the freedom to choose for themselves.

If you’re a C-level exec or manager, your goal will be to create an environment where everyone gets to choose their moment of refreshment. Then get the heck out of the way!

Let’s suppose you want to set up a company playroom — you know, a space designated for fun activities. Great! Just do it in a way that gives people a variety of options. A little bit of this, a little bit of that — multiple choice.

After all, every person has his or her own thing. Some people are competitive dog groomers, others are training for curling in the Winter Olympics, and some even own a pygmy goat farm on the side.* You never know! Power comes from establishing a Culture of WIN that provides the leeway to find something that matches each unique personality.

In previous chapters, you learned that the Oasis break is about what you or a family member define as meaningful, fun, and refreshing. Additionally, it’s ideal for employees to control when these breaks occur. Optimally, employees would create a schedule that matches their own unique productivity rhythm. People have certain hours of the day when they perform better than others. Mandating that everyone take a break at 10 a.m. will infringe on individuals who brag about being the Michael Jordan of 10 a.m. We want to, as best we can, avoid getting in the way of productivity.

In summary, you are in control of your own level of enjoyment. You can use the techniques that I shared earlier in the book for how to enjoy having fun. So why worry?

LESS-EFFECTIVE EXAMPLES

Before we look at companies that are properly building a Culture of WIN, let’s consider a couple of less-effective approaches.

Marissa Mayer, former CEO of the now-gutted Yahoo and once a Google engineer, said that during Google’s formative years, it was possible to work 130 hours per week if “you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”

Wow. One can argue that Google’s success came about because of this mindset. I would argue that it came despite it. For a handful of IPO-crazed kids with a gaggle of stock options looking to be the next Google, scheduled bathroom breaks may be a wonderful motivator. For the rest of us, not so much.

The Culture of WISH is a dangerous gamble that puts too much pressure on employees. The burnout, turnover, and health implications are frightening.

Don’t believe me yet?

Consider the case of Goldman Sachs, which in June 2015 encouraged employees to go home by midnight and not to come to work before 7 a.m. A policy was created prohibiting interns from working more than seventeen hours in one day. You read that right. A limit of seventeen hours per day. And that was a new policy . . . for interns.

What caused the company to enact such a generous and sweeping improvement in the quality of life for its employees?* This was a breakneck, win-at-any-cost culture created by the promise of making it to the top, someday . . . hopefully. What would prompt a financial giant to draw back?

It began when, tragically, a Bank of America intern was found dead in his shower. Doctors believe the cause of death stemmed from epileptic seizures due to working seventy-two hours straight.

Yet just two years earlier, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein had begun encouraging his employees to take up hobbies and take weekends off. He was quoted as saying, “You have to be interesting. You have to have interests away from the narrowing thing of what you do. You have to be somebody who somebody else wants to talk to.”

Why was there such a disconnect between the words and actions of the CEO and his employees? Was it a case of a CEO saying one thing publicly while privately demanding something else from his employees? In my experience, no. Most often, it’s the Culture of WISH slowly creeping its way into our offices while we tap away at our computers unaware.

Some people may argue that working overtime and losing sleep are the price of success. If you want to be the champ, you have to take the punches. You need to work long hours. You need to sacrifice. You need to be willing to put your health on the line.

Me? I say hogwash! People can achieve more if they utilize the power of a meaningful break. It is less hazardous to their health physically, socially, mentally, and emotionally. It certainly is better for employee morale and retention. There is a huge cost to creating a company that is based on relentless, nonstop work. It must be avoided at every position. Not just for productivity but for profitability as well.

EFFECTIVE EXAMPLES

Let’s consider some positive examples of big, successful companies that are embracing the power of having fun.

I regularly team up with LinkedIn for many courses in its Learning library. While working with its employees, I get to see firsthand the culture they’ve created.

LinkedIn offers monthly events called InDays — a wonderful example of how to facilitate a monthly Oasis for your company. On an InDay, LinkedIn encourages its employees to innovate, think creatively, or work on inspirational projects. It offers monthly themes for these InDays that provide a great degree of flexibility. These themes are simply guide-posts to give the employees ideas of what to do with their day. This is, essentially, a monthly Oasis. Does this lead to success? LinkedIn boasts a top-ten ranking on Glassdoor as one of the best “large” places to work, and CEO Jeff Weiner holds a top-five CEO ranking.

A friend of mine works for Pixar. When the company isn’t developing heartwarming stories or completely changing the way animation is made and distributed, it’s creating opportunities for employees to have a bit of fun on the side. There’s a massive playroom at the studio in Emeryville, California. Pixar also encourages employees to have projects outside work. These are self-designed breaks from the norm that allow them to express themselves in new ways, such as non-animation-related art projects. Imagine how external creativity contributes to the company’s internal performance. In fact, you don’t have to imagine because you can see the results year in and year out on the big screen, not to mention box-office returns and awards received! This policy could be compared to a monthly or even a weekly or yearly Oasis.

Kiva.org, described by Fortune magazine as the “hottest nonprofit on the planet,” is a microfinance nonprofit with a cause close to my heart. It creates a specific kind of Oasis for its employees: adult recess — essentially, a thirty-minute daily Oasis to snack, listen to music, or engage in any kind of unstructured playtime. After all, a day of alleviating poverty sure can build up your appetite!

Now it’s time for us to move from just reading about these fun examples to making it happen in your workplace. In the following chapters, we’re going to consider positive steps that everyone on the organization chart can take, from the top executives to managers to every single employee regardless of position.

* At this moment, while I’m reviewing the copious red notes the copyeditor made to my manuscript, I’m suppressing a touch of nausea.

** The National Sleep Foundation estimates that the average adult needs seven to nine hours of sleep per night. Some outliers require as little as six or as many as ten!

* I’ve yet to see a company rec room devoted to pygmy goats. But anything is possible.

* I wrote that in my most sarcastic voice possible.