Schumpeter
Down with fun
Sep 16th 2010
ONE of the many pleasures of watching Mad Men , a television drama about the
advertising industry in the early 1960s, is examining the ways in which office
life has changed over the years. One obvious change makes people feel good
about themselves: they no longer treat women as second-class citizens. But the
other obvious change makes them feel a bit more uneasy: they have lost the art
of enjoying themselves at work.
The ad-men in those days enjoyed simple pleasures. They puffed away at their
desks. They drank throughout the day. They had affairs with their colleagues.
They socialised not in order to bond, but in order to get drunk.
These days many companies are obsessed with fun. Software firms in Silicon
Valley have installed rock-climbing walls in their reception areas and put
inflatable animals in their offices. Wal-Mart orders its cashiers to smile at
all and sundry. The cult of fun has spread like some disgusting haemorrhagic
disease. Acclaris, an American IT company, has a chief fun officer . TD Bank,
the American arm of Canada s Toronto Dominion, has a Wow! department that
dispatches costume-clad teams to surprise and delight successful workers. Red
Bull, a drinks firm, has installed a slide in its London office.
Fun at work is becoming a business in its own right. Madan Kataria, an Indian
who styles himself the guru of giggling , sells laughter yoga to corporate
clients. Fun at Work, a British company, offers you more hilarity than you can
handle , including replacing your receptionists with Ab Fab lookalikes.
Chiswick Park, an office development in London, brands itself with the slogan
enjoy-work , and hosts lunchtime events such as sheep-shearing and
geese-herding.
The cult of fun is deepening as well as widening. Google is the acknowledged
champion: its offices are blessed with volleyball courts, bicycle paths, a
yellow brick road, a model dinosaur, regular games of roller hockey and several
professional masseuses. But now two other companies have challenged Google for
the jester s crown Twitter, a microblogging service, and Zappos, an online
shoe-shop.
Twitter s website stresses how wacky the company is: workers wear cowboy hats
and babble that: Crazy things happen every day it s pretty ridiculous. The
company has a team of people whose job is to make workers happy: for example,
by providing them with cold towels on a hot day. Zappos boasts that creating
fun and a little weirdness is one of its core values. Tony Hsieh, the boss,
shaves his head and spends 10% of his time studying what he calls the science
of happiness . He once joked that Zappos was suing the Walt Disney Company for
claiming that it was the happiest place on earth . The company engages in
regular random acts of kindness : workers form a noisy conga line and single
out one of their colleagues for praise. The praisee then has to wear a silly
hat for a week.
This cult of fun is driven by three of the most popular management fads of the
moment: empowerment, engagement and creativity. Many companies pride themselves
on devolving power to front-line workers. But surveys show that only 20% of
workers are fully engaged with their job . Even fewer are creative. Managers
hope that fun will magically make workers more engaged and creative. But the
problem is that as soon as fun becomes part of a corporate strategy it ceases
to be fun and becomes its opposite at best an empty shell and at worst a
tiresome imposition.
The most unpleasant thing about the fashion for fun is that it is mixed with a
large dose of coercion. Companies such as Zappos don t merely celebrate
wackiness. They more or less require it. Compulsory fun is nearly always
cringe-making. Twitter calls its office a Twoffice . Boston Pizza encourages
workers to send golden bananas to colleagues who are having fun while being
the best . Behind the fun fa ade there often lurks some crude management
thinking: a desire to brand the company as better than its rivals, or a plan to
boost productivity through team-building. Twitter even boasts that it has
worked hard to create an environment that spawns productivity and happiness .
If it s fun, it needn t be compulsory
While imposing ersatz fun on their employees, companies are battling against
the real thing. Many force smokers to huddle outside like furtive criminals.
Few allow their employees to drink at lunch time, let alone earlier in the day.
A regiment of busybodies from lawyers to human-resources functionaries is
waging war on office romance, particularly between people of different ranks.
Hewlett-Packard, a computer-maker, recently sacked its successful chief
executive, Mark Hurd, after a contractor made vague allegations later quietly
settled of sexual harassment. (Oracle, a rival, quickly snapped up Mr Hurd.)
The merchants of fake fun have met some resistance. When Wal-Mart tried to
impose alien rules on its German staff such as compulsory smiling and a ban on
affairs with co-workers it touched off a guerrilla war that ended only when the
supermarket chain announced it was pulling out of Germany in 2006. But such
victories are rare. For most wage slaves forced to pretend they are having fun
at work, the only relief is to poke fun at their tormentors. Popular culture
provides some inspiration. You don t have to be mad to work here. In fact we
ask you to complete a medical questionnaire to ensure that you are not,
deadpans David Brent, the risible boss in The Office , a satirical television
series. Homer Simpson s employer, a nuclear-power plant, has regular funny hat
days but lax safety standards. Mad Men reminds people of a world they have
lost a world where bosses did not think that fun was a management tool and
where employees could happily quaff Scotch at noon. Cheers to that.