All work and play?

I was struck recently by hearing someone at work running through a gamut of complaint, covering everything from past actions to scenarios of future gloom. This reminded me of the wonderful saying: “You can’t change the past but you can ruin a perfectly good present by worrying about the future.”

The changing nature of the workplace over the last decade, where more people work excessively long hours and are more (emotionally) remote from one another through the new technologies of emails and texts, has made work even less a place of joy and camaraderie. Recent surveys show a disproportionate part of most people’s days are spent in front of a computer, laptop or blackberry with minimal human contact. This extends to lunchtime as well, where industry surveys reveal the average worker takes a break of around 23 minutes, with the vast majority eating their lunch at their desks while reading e-mails. A glance around the office at midday does not lend itself to doubting such claims. And then we wonder why we have irritable colleagues.

A big issue for me, as an organisational psychologist, is how can we inject more fun into the workplace? Remember, we spend more of our waking hours at work than with families and friends, so why shouldn’t we enjoy and be stimulated by it. There have been corporate attempts at lightheartedness, particularly in the City, by simple efforts such as ‘dress down Fridays’ or desk massages, but this is an area where we need to engage our imaginations more fully. We need to ensure employees spend some quality time with one another – talking, working and taking part in more playful activity.

A few years ago, for example, Liverpool City Council and Phones4U banned intranet communications between colleagues in the same building to promote colleague-to-colleague engagement and contact – a fundamental ingredient for feeling part of a wider community. To this recipe, we need to add playtime, opportunities at work to go beyond daily tasks and objectives. This could take the form of charitable work within the local community, mentoring in deprived areas or intramural sport. Some companies even allow staff to invite family members to the office, while others let pets in the workplace, to bridge the gap between work and home and create a wider sense of family. It is not beyond the wit of HR professionals and senior managers to think of novel ways to engage their workforce, to create occasional dollops of fun through good works. It is through utilising such opportunities that a genuine sense of corporate identity is created.

We all have the responsibility to make our working environment a better and more human, or even humane, place to be. This was a point highlighted by playwright George Bernard Shaw in Mrs Warren’s Profession, when a character says: “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them – make them.” 􀂄