Fun Works: Creating Places Where People Love to Work - Softcover

Yerkes, Leslie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1576754081 ISBN 13: 9781576754085

Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Leading-edge organizations have discovered that fun can--and does--translate into bottom line success. By harnessing the power of fun, companies find they can better retain employees and customers, motivate teams, improve productivity, increase innovation, and create a sense of community.
Leslie Yerkes details precisely how eleven successful companies--including Southwest Airlines, Pike Place Fish, Isle of Capri Casinos, EmployEase, and Prudential--have integrated fun into the normal course of business. This new edition provides updates on how these same companies have grown, prospered, and continued to thrive--in spite of national tragedies, natural disaster, growing competition, and changing economic conditions--in part because of the culture they have created through what Yerkes calls "The Fun/Work Fusion."
Yerkes illustrates eleven principles--from capitalizing on the spontaneous to hiring good people and getting out of their way--that will inspire you to inject a sense of playfulness and joy into your workplace. Full of real-life examples, strategies, ideas, resources, tools, tips, and techniques, Fun Works will help any company in any industry become a place where people love to work.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LESLIE YERKES IS PRESIDENT of Catalyst Consulting Group, Inc. (www.changeisfun.com) an organizational development and change management consult- ing firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. Leslie’s business goal is to help people create sustainable organizations. Her life goal is to create a framework in which people can draw on their own resources to find creative solutions. Her clients have included Chrysler
Corporation, The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, United Church of Christ, International Steel Group, Mittal Steel USA-Cleveland, and NASA. A subspecialty of Leslie’s is making non-profits healthy and sustainable.
Leslie is a recognized consultant, author, and speaker through- out the United States and Europe. She is considered an expert in her field and is frequently quoted in the media. She is the coauthor of the bestselling 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work, Beans: Four Principles for Running a Business in Good Times or Bad, and They Just Don’t Get It! Changing Resistance into Understanding. Her works have been trans- lated into more than a dozen languages selling hundreds of thou- sands of copies world wide.
A graduate of Wittenberg University and Case Western Reserve University, she has taught at John Carroll University and Baldwin Wallace College. She is on the faculty at the Weatherhead Dively Center of Executive Education and the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University.

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The Case for Integrating Fun and Work

Anyone who’s worked with contractors on a building project has a story; usually it’s a horror story. Contractors, these stories go, are a real pain. They tell you one thing and do another; they substitute materials; they move tradespeople arbitrarily from one job to another so there’s no continuity on your project. In short, working with contractors is not fun. Or so the stories go.

My experience, however, is 180° different. My contractor story is a fun one and the payoff, the final product, is award-winning. And it’s different because in my story the contractors had fun at work.

It took me two years to find the right space for my new office. For the first five years of my business, I worked from my home (like many entrepreneurs) creating a very successful and profitable change-management consulting practice. Now I wanted to have my own, separate office space — a space in which I could have employees and clients and fun.

My requirements for this space included being downtown on the ground floor with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on trees — not an easy task in Cleveland, Ohio. But I persevered. The space I eventually found was connected to a city park and had the windows I needed. Inside the space, however, were rooms and walls and doors. Because of the kind of the business I’m in, one that places high value on the free flow of ideas and information, I wanted a special space that would embody those principles. To me, that meant it had to have no rooms, no offices, no head-of-the-table, no hierarchy.

Fortunately, Bill Mason, the architect who was assigned to me by the building owner, understood my ideas and was able to develop my vision into a physical reality. The successful birth of my new office space depended on the creation of a good plan, and the plan that Bill created was perfect. All we needed to be successful now was a good midwife. We needed a contractor.

Because this was my first ‘real’ office space, and because it was a unique, non-traditional design, and because I’m a naturally involved and enthusiastic person (some even call me a Hokey-Pokey Person but that’s another story), I visited the site twice daily; once in the morning to ask the contractor and tradespeople what was planned for the day, and once in the evening to check on the progress. Because my work with clients deals constantly with organizational 4development, I was acutely aware that everyone works better when someone’s interested in what they’re doing and when they’re praised for their performance and their results. I was prepared to provide that.

At the end of one working day, as the space changed from wires and nails and dust into something that began to resemble the dream I had in my head of my new work home, I found myself really excited with the day’s results. I was filled with exuberance and sudden, uncontrollable energy and, like some character from a Jules Fieffer cartoon, I decided to do ‘A Dance of Done Well.’ But instead of just performing this impromptu jig by myself I asked the three contractors present to join me. And somewhat to my surprise, they did.

Visualize one blonde lady in a dress, a man wearing paint-spattered bib overalls, and two men in jeans with tool belts around their waists holding hands and dancing in a circle. You now have a picture of ‘The Dance of Done Well.’

Over the course of the next several weeks, this impromptu experience developed into a ritual. In the mornings, I would meet with the craftsmen onsite and discuss what they were going to accomplish that day; in the evenings we would celebrate their accomplishments with a dance. If the day’s project was drywall, for example, in the evening we celebrated with ‘The Dance of Drywall Done Well.’ The days that followed became a lot of fun for everyone involved. The work of the day was enthusiastically anticipated by each tradesman and results were at the highest level of accomplishment. Because of these daily dances, each individual contractor and craftsman strove to do their best work — work that would be worthy of a dance of celebration. The space was becoming my dream.

Finally, the office was completed enough for me to move in but, as in many building experiences, there were still a few last-minute details to be handled. On this particular day, two seasoned and highly conservative electricians showed up to install the gallery-style lighting for the sculpture that was commissioned for our office. I explained to them why the sculpture was important to me and our company, what it represented, and how I envisioned this work of art affecting the clients who came into our space. The two men understood and declared that they’d give the project their utmost attention, and then they said to me, “You aren’t going to make us dance, are you?”

I was amazed. In the contracting community in Cleveland, I had apparently become known as ‘the lady who makes you dance.’ I smiled and laughed and told them I wouldn’t make them dance but asked them if it was okay if I got excited when they were done. They allowed as that would be all right and went to work.

By noon they had finished and I inspected their work and they showed me how the switches worked and how to change the bulbs when they burned out, no easy task in a space with 14-foot ceilings! I thanked them profusely and shook their hands. This was the point at which I expected them to leave. They had performed their best work and they had been praised for it. All the structures and requirements of the work relationship had apparently been fulfilled. Instead, they stood at the door, silent and expectant, looking alternately at their work and at 5me. After several seconds of this waiting, one of them looked me in the eye and said, “Aren’t you going to ask us to dance?”

I had discovered an essential truth about what makes work valuable: Work Needs Fun. If there isn’t fun in work, if there isn’t enjoyment, work doesn’t mean as much to the workers.

So, what did we do? We danced.

THE FUSION OF WORK AND FUN we experienced while building my new office space created a working relationship which all the members of the process valued highly. Not only was it a peak experience for the individuals involved, but the outcome of our work created a peak result: the space was gorgeous. The reality exceeded my dreams. Together, we had created something greater than the sum of its parts. The fusion of fun and work also has bottom-line value: our office space was awarded the AIA Ohio Design Award of Honor and the IBD-CID Award of Merit. To my way of thinking, these awards are the visible, tangible, outside confirmation that fun works. And it works well!

My new space also allowed me to attract and retain employees and clients whose values were in alignment with mine. Because my workspace so perfectly represented my energy and values, people who entered it for the first time would immediately feel comfortable and energized themselves — or they wouldn’t! Either way, I now had a first-line screening tool to help me select people who would best improve my business.

My contractor story is one example of how when fun and work are successfully integrated both the process and the resultant product are improved.

IF WORK AND FUN ARE BEST WHEN integrated, how did we get to the current state where the common perception is that fun is an add-on? That the only time we are allowed to have fun is after work is over; that the only way we can have fun is to earn it through hard work? Work hasn’t always been perceived in this way; work and the perception of work have...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1576754081
• ISBN 13: 9781576754085
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: eucomply OÜ, Pärnu mnt; hello@eucompliancepartner.com; ; 139b-14; Tallinn; 11317; Estland