That's Chief Entertainment Officer

Tweet

Root Learning also celebrates staff at its end-of-year fete, honoring the employee with the most animated hand gestures, for example. But a more substantive appreciation of vivid personalities is a wall of employee caricatures in Root Learning's lobby. The day a new hire arrives at Root Learning, one of the company's graphic artists draws her. Over the years, details are added to reflect a growing familiarity with her tastes and quirks. In year eight, the caricature is decked out with a full array of personal effects and an appropriate background. Everyone knows the receptionist likes to change hair colors. Lest they forget, the drawing in which she sports a rainbow coiffure is a vivid reminder.

You Call This Work?

Arguably the Holy Grail of fun quests is making work itself entertaining. That's easy if your company produces board games, tougher if it produces boards. "People spend 40, 50, 60 hours a week doing something they don't like, and that's not healthy," says Ronald Culberson, a Herndon, Virginia-based speaker on bringing humor into organizations. "How do you make mundane processes fun? Aside from Southwest Airlines (NYSE:LUV), not many companies have managed it."

Employees left to their own devices may come up with ingenious ways to relieve the tedium, Culberson says. He recalls visiting one organization where administrative workers took turns opening vast volumes of mail. Every day, an employee not so engaged would place a small gift--a coupon for an ice cream cone, a comic strip, a candy bar--in an envelope and plant it among the rest for his colleague to find. In another company, clerks used stools, stepladders, overturned boxes, and the like to transform their file room into an obstacle course. "It sounds goofy," says Culberson. "But it made that process a little more interesting."

If you can't make discrete tasks fun, you can at least add excitement to the context in which they're performed. CEOs often fail to recognize cultural malaise because they themselves are on a perpetual thrill ride of wins and losses. Rank-and-filers, meanwhile, twiddle their thumbs in the ticket booth. Giving staff some numbers and teaching them to keep score gooses ordinary jobs with the frisson of competition. "Winning is fun," says Ned Compton, president of DEI, a 73-person Cincinnati company that designs and builds banks and other financial institutions. "We share sales and losses and financial performance with our people, and we explain what it all means. When we make a sale we all go down to our Santa Fe room and have a glass of champagne. They see the competition, and that's exciting."

Virtual Meeting Strategies goes further. Lots of companies build their financial periods around themes, but few do so with the creativity of Virtual Meeting, an Indianapolis facilitator of online communication. This trimester, for example, principal Neal Rothermel launched the theme "Big Picture" with a presentation in a movie theater that included popcorn and a preview of summer blockbusters. Another time, when the company had to execute a record amount of business, Rothermel declared the company to be "in Survivor mode." The executive team cleared the conference room and brought in tikis. Employees sat cross-legged on the floor. Everyone chose tribal names and wore headbands. For the rest of the period, tribes at each meeting would nominate survivors who had contributed the most or provided the best customer service. (No one was voted off the island.) "I wanted to find a way to share war stories across teams and celebrate above-and-beyond efforts," says Rothermel. "The returns on productivity and morale have been exponential."

And It's for a Good Cause

The first question CEOs ask when choosing philanthropies is "What best jibes with my mission?" The second question isn't "What would be the most fun?"--and probably it shouldn't be. Still, charities routinely build fun events into their fundraising. Companies can also have a good time doing good.

So what charitable work is fun? Runs and walks are great for the sinewy of thigh but are often held on weekends. (And we don't have to remind you that fun takes place on the company's time, not the employees', correct?) Anything collaborative--building a house, working side by side in a soup kitchen--can be fun. Helping children is often rejuvenating. DEI has adopted a class at an inner city elementary school. Employees take kids fishing and throw them a Christmas party, among other activities.

Jim Schleckser, founder of the six-person consultancy the CEO Project in Potomac, Maryland, observes that fun events are also a fine opportunity for CEOs to do some good for their companies by demonstrating servant leadership. "The CEO should be out there flipping the burgers, helping clean up, letting other people be the captain," says Schleckser. "But you've got to be the same person at the barbecue that you are the rest of the year. It isn't fun if it's not sincere."

Stephanie Clifford, Bobbie Gossage, and Athena Schindelheim contributed reporting for this article.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. Magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture. @LeighEBuchanan