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.

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 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.

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