Column | Make your work more fun while playing

To be honest, it wasn’t easy that first week of work after the holidays. The contrast was also great. The freedom, fun and relaxation of the past few weeks, against today’s agenda, e-mails and deadlines. Wouldn’t it be smart to occasionally put a little holiday fun into the working week?

This is roughly what Playful Work Design is all about, a phenomenon where Arnold Bakker, professor of work and organizational psychology at Erasmus University, and colleagues, researches.

Playful Work Design (PWD) can be translated as: brightening up your work, not by changing its content, but by adding fun and challenge to what you already did.

According to Bakker and colleagues, there are two approaches you can take.

1playful play. Playing playfully means making your work more fun with humor and fantasy. It’s the light-hearted, non-serious approach. For example, with every customer you meet, you think about what he or she did last night. Or you always come up with a nice opening question for the weekly work meeting (suppose you get a tattoo today, where do you put it and what does it look like?).

2agonistic play. Playing agonistic is a bit more serious. With challenges, competitions and game rules you make your work a little more exciting. For example, you compete with yourself: can you write thirty emails in an hour? Or you bet with your colleagues at the other location that they won’t be able to use twenty percent less energy this month.

PWD is primarily about positive experiences. But approaching your work as a game also leads to other interesting psychological effects. Think of: more motivation, creativity and energy, more pleasant working together, and less boredom and stress. And all of this can lead to better performance.

If you are a manager, read this and think: interesting, I’m going to arrange this for the club, then I have to disappoint you. Bakker and colleagues argue that PWD requires a bottom-up approach. It only works if people arrange their own fun. Implementing fun top-down can even backfire.

What does help is encouraging personal initiative in this area. For example by – I’ll call it something crazy – spreading a column from a serious newspaper about playing at work.

Also good to know: the positive effects of PWD have largely disappeared after a day. Bakker and colleagues established this in recent research. So you have to work a little on your job satisfaction every day. The risk is that this in itself also becomes a tedious task.

Last question: isn’t that brightening up your work a bit superficial? Maybe. But what’s wrong with a little air and emptiness, if it helps you stay sane?

Remco Campert said: “The meaning of life is meaning in life.” And I think that also applies to the meaning of my work.

Ben Tiggelaar writes weekly about personal leadership, work and management.