By Ryan Quinn
I’m am going to begin this blog entry in an unusual way: with two video clips and a challenge. Please watch the clips below (referred to me by my colleague, Gretchen Spreitzer), and then try the challenge I describe beneath them.
CLIP #1
CLIP #2
The Challenge
The power of the piano stairs and the world’s deepest rubbish bin is that because the stairs and the trash can were fun, people engaged in healthier or more community-oriented behaviors than they would have otherwise. Making the activities fun changed people behaviors in measurable ways. The challenge this presents to leaders, then, is this:
- Identify at least one activity that the people who work for you find to be hard, that they do not like to do, or that is drudgery.
- Come up with a way, like the piano stairs or the rubbish bin, to make that activity more fun. (“More fun” does not have to be more expensive or more technological, as it is the video clips. For example, one activity that I hate as a professional educator is grading exams. I could make this more fun by asking my students to hide a word or a phrase in their exams and challenging me to find it, or by setting up a competition with one of my colleagues to see who can finish their grading first.)
For those of you who take this challenge, please comment on this blog entry to tell me what you did and how it worked. I am curious to see how creative you are!
The Science Behind Fun
Many of the activities that people engage in at work are activities that they do because they “have” to do them. Their motivation for doing those activities is “external”: they do it because they want to get promoted or because they do not want to get fired or because it’s their job and that is what they “have to do.” Some activities, in contrast, are intrinsically motivating. They are interesting or fun or enjoyable for their own sake. People would do them even if there were no rewards or punishments. This is what makes these activities fun.
In a review of the scientific literature on intrinsic motivation at work, Marylène Gagné and Edward Deci found that
- Extrinsic rewards like pay-for-performance plans can reduce people’s intrinsic motivation.
- Managers and their subordinates are BOTH more likely to be intrinsically motivated when the MANAGERS’ bosses
- acknowledge their perspectives,
- provide information in non-controlling ways,
- offer choices, and
- encourage initiative.
- Intrinsically motivated employees with bosses like those described above
- perform better,
- trust their bosses more,
- receive higher performance evaluations,
- persist more,
- are more accepting of organizational change,
- are more satisfied, and
- were more committed to their organizations. [1]
Similarly, in a review of research on play at work, Babis Mainemelis and Sarah Ronson [2] point out that play and work are not separate activities, but are orientations that we can take toward activities–even the same activity. They explain how a playful approach to work–and even, within limits, play that helps people escape from work for a few moments–can lead to creative outcomes like the invention of Kevlar, of nearly-unbreakable guitar strings, or internet technologies. Play at work is more likely to happen when
- Jobs are designed to have autonomy, complexity, and variety
- Employees do not have to work under threats
- Employees are given time and space for play (like the 20% of work time at W. L. Gore and Associates)
- When employees have a disposition to be playful
Making Work Fun
My challenge at the outset of this entry was for managers to come up with ways to make work fun for their employees. An even more empowering way to approach this challenge might be to ask one’s employees to come up with ideas of how to make their work fun (giving them the autonomy, time, and space for play that I mentioned above).
Coming up with ideas of how to make work fun may be difficult, though. When this happens, it is useful to think metaphorically. Leaders and employees could ask, for example, ”Does this activity have any similarities to any activities that I would consider to be fun?” or “What would this activity look like if it were a sport, an artistic challenge, or a leisure activity?” Practice in using metaphorical questions can go a long way to help people develop the ability to make work fun.
Conclusion
Eight or nine years ago, I had a conversation with an MBA student who did not fit the typical mold. He had earned a Ph.D. in engineering, worked for many years in a small engineering firm, and when the firm was purchased and dissolved in his late thirties, he decided to get his MBA. During the interview, he told me a story about a project he participated in as part of his MBA classes. He was interviewing the CEO of a design shop in Italy, where they designed everything from sofas to Lamborghini parts. He asked the CEO how he motivated and rewarded his people. The MBA student had just completed a class on organizational behavior and human resource management, where he learned all about reward systems from 360-degree evaluations to cafeteria compensation, so he was intrigued to see what this CEO would say. To his surprise, however, the CEO just stared at him blankly. “What do you mean?”
The MBA student attempted to explain about all the things he learned in his class, and how different rewards can motivate people differently.
After listening, the CEO said, “Well, we pay our people good salaries, but frankly, people work here because they like doing the work.”
The MBA student was stunned. As he described this experience to me he said, “Then I took off my MBA hat, put on my engineering hat, and remembered: That was why I became an engineer in the first place.”
That, I think, may say it all.
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References
[1] Gagne, M & Deci, E. L. (2005). Self-determination theory and work motivation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26: 331-362.
[2] Mainemelis, C. & Ronson, S. (2006). “Ideas are born in fields of play: Towards a theory of play and creativity in organizational settings.” In B. M. Staw and A. P. Brief (Eds.) Research in Organizational Behavior (Vol. 27, 81-131). Oxford: JAI Press.
Very fun & interesting post! Great video clips. I also especially like the idea of taking on a bite-sized challenge, by focusing on just one task at a time and figuring out how to make it more fun (whether for your own task or for someone you lead.) I’m fortunate in that my job easily fits within all 4 of the criteria for a more likely play/work combo you mention above, all of which I believe are essential to having the space and comfort to do the combo effectively.
Re: intrinsic/extrinsic motivation, it’s easy to observe this in action with children. My 8 year old loves to read more than anything, and when left to his own intrinsic motivation, will choose books that are beyond his normal reading “level” and will read for hours on end. Interestingly, when assigned through school to maintain a weekly reading log of number of pages read, with a free book as a reward if he reaches a 200 page goal, he instantly switches to an extrinsic goal-oriented focus and selects lower level books (that he can read more quickly) on subjects that he doesn’t enjoy as much. If he’s given time-oriented goals (number of minutes read), he sticks with his intrinsic love of reading and chooses the challenging and more enjoyable books, without even realizing that he’s surpassed the 200-page goal because it’s all for fun.
Thanks for encouraging me think a bit differently today!
When I was teaching second grade, I wanted to have the kids read some additional books when they had some free time. I carpeted the top of a cabinet (about 6 feet off the ground) and made a sign “Reading Nest’. The kids loved being the one or two that could climb up to the top and read quietly. One day the principal came in and asked what would happen if one of the children fell off the cabinet… “Could break an arm I suppose” was my reply and the principal never asked again. This kept the kids reading for a whole year.
Hi Ryan, great post. Gets me thinking. I think it is very true that intrinsic motivation is best. But are those videos really examples of instrinsic motivation? The “fun” component, after all, is sort of added to the “outside” of the basic activity (going up stairs, picking up trash) without have anything instrinsic to do with it. It’s a fun, shiny veneer.
I don’t think that Italian CEO was talking about work being “fun” in that sense. In fact, I shudder to think of an organization that carries out intrinsically boring things in extrinsically fun ways. The solution to the problem of motivation is to rethink the values that defined the tasks–and the values that connect tasks to each other in jobs and positions.
I think “funning up” drudgery is a very short term solution. A shiny veneer of fun quickly wears off. (I think the videos show the effect of novelty, not fun, on use. The peeeeeeeeeeeeew-bhwang would quickly become a nuissance in a part normally full of birdsong. Surely the piano steps would sound horrid at peak periods?)
Final point: if I’m right about the fun dimension as extrinsic in these cases then we need to remember the research in social psychology that show that rewarding things that people are intrinsically motivated to do has negative effects on precisely that motivation.
Hi Thomas. Thank you for your thoughtful comment. You make some very important points. I agree with you that some ways of making work intrinsically interesting or intrinsically motivating are more substantive than others. My intent in using the “fun theory” videos was simply to illustrate that concept of re-framing in a fun way for readers. Some forms of re-framing would certainly be more substantive or more enduring than others. While it is true that these specific examples may be more veneer than substance, my hope was simply to use them to illustrate how we can use metaphorical thinking as a way to come up with new ideas about how to approach our work.
I know of some instances, for example, where what may have begun as fun veneers have become substantive over time. Some of my colleagues, for example, have studied a hospital billing department where the work is often repetitive drudgery. Among other fun diversions, the manager has instilled water gun breaks to help the employees disconnect, re-engage, build relationships, and so forth. These kinds of interventions could have been superficial veneer–and probably would be in many organizations. They work in this billing department, though. I think one of the reasons is because the employees know that the leader is not trying to manipulate them, but that she really cares about them and is trying to help them make the best of a tough situation. Her department has the lowest billable days in the industry. She makes the veneer substantive.
The billing department’s way is certainly not the only way to do it. I agree that the Italian CEO deliberately made work fun for his employees. His employees work there out of interest, rather than out of fun per se. And, as you point out, a leader can help employees discover this kind of interest in their work through re-framing—particularly if the re-framing is a joint effort of mutual concern, rather than a manipulative tactic on the part of the leader.
I think the billing department example is a great complement to the Italian design company. In the latter case, “fun” isn’t an issue because the work is intrinsically interesting. In the former, fun is installed as a break from drudgery, but no one is being asked to — or manipulated into — thinking the boring task is fun. In both cases, a serious scale of values is being respected (the worker’s own sense of the value of the work is not being called into question). I think I’m reacting the the way the videos gloss over (to stick the metaphor of a veneer) the everyday boredom of some things.
The piano stairs just reminded me of something, not quite related. In Copenhagen they had a problem with too many people taking the elevators down to the metro station platforms. They were intended for people in wheelchairs and with baby carriages, and these people (who really needed the elevators because they couldn’t take the escalators) found themselves having to wait. The solution wasn’t to make the stairs more fun; on the contrary, all that was needed was to make the elevators a bit slower.
Great sharing…fun and interesting to know the length people goes to nowadays.
I always believe that all work are the same as at some point they will get to be just routine. So for me in order to stay motivated at work, I constantly do my best to make my job interesting to me…apart from just monetary boost
But sometimes the “evil” part will come into our mind and have us thinking whether is al really worth our effort…sigh… Well its just a fact of life even though you are your own boss…right?
I recently came across an interesting article about fun at work.
http://www.e2i.com.sg/e2i_says/e2i_blog/2011/6/10/work_is_fun/