Having fun at work is the secret to a great business
If you don’t have fun at work, then why are you working? While this might sound like a controversial topic, you need to consider the amount of time that an employee spends every day at the workplace. In average in the UK, your team will spend over 10 hours a day at the office, which leaves little time to maintain a healthy work/life balance and to unwind at the end of the day.
But besides long hours, there’s nothing worse than spending long hours in an environment that is stressful, uncomfortable and deadly serious. If your team can’t relax at work, their performance will be impacted, and gradually cases of mental illnesses, such as burnout, depression and anxiety will take over. Additionally, neither the team nor the customers can deal with a company that doesn’t know how to laugh and be entertaining. So how do you bring fun in the workplace?
Better team building strategies
Fun is part of natural social interactions. In the same way that couples who laugh together stay together, teams who can have fun together are more likely to be strong together. That’s precisely why a lot of team management theories recommend fun team building activities, such as booking an afternoon at the Bawtry Paintball Fields. Not only does it provide a great way to relieve stress at the end of a long project, but it’s also helpful for a business owner to develop a better understanding of the people in the team. Paintball game requires a problem-solving approach as well as strong leadership skills, on both sides if you play with two groups of people. You’d be able to playfully find out the strength of your employees at a time where everyone can relax.
Lead with humour
According to Eisenhower, your sense of humour is part of getting along with people to get things done. As a result, taking work relationships more seriously than they should could actually damage your leadership skills. As humour is an essential tool to help people relax around you, it’s easy to see how a workplace with no fun is a workplace with no good leader. Indeed, at an organisational level, companies such as Zappos and Southwest Airlines have built their brand culture and employee retaining strategies on humour. You don’t need to be a standup comedian, but using humour can enhance the team spirit, and drive motivation.
Engaging with your audience
Similarly, having fun shouldn’t stay in the workplace. Being able to create fun and engaging content pieces is a marketing tool in the modern age. What is fun content? It’s about building a variety of content pieces that are designed to answer the questions of your audience while hooking them to your words. You could write useful content, but if your visitors get bored reading it – let’s say a 12-page-long whitepaper about the technicality of a software solution – then you’ve failed to engage. Keep it sweet, accessible and informative, and make it fun. If you’re sharing technical data, why not use an infographic document? Want to create troubleshooting material? Turn it into a video.
In short, there’s one question left for you to answer: is your business fun?
