Workplace fun can make teams more productive

At many workplaces, coworker bonding looks vastly different now than it did pre-COVID-19. Even for those who have returned to the office regularly, the default ways of connecting have changed.

A prime example of that is at the fun dept. This Wilmington, Delaware-based consultancy, founded in 2006, helps companies administer team-building activities and inject fun — think trivia games, pop culture quizzes and low-key physical challenges — into meetings.

Fun dept. founder Nick Gianoulis and chief creative officer Christopher Bruce spoke with The Philadelphia Inquirer leaders can fit game play and team-building into the workplace of the future.

QYour whole business is based on making the workplace more fun, right? So what does that mean to you, and why is it necessary?

GIANOULIS >> As a young manager, I was charged with not just generating revenue and that kind of thing, but motivating employees. And that company had a work-hard, play-hard ethic — that was before anybody was even talking about culture. This company was having fun at work primarily with celebratory things, when we hit milestones, and the typical holiday party and summer picnic on a Saturday. throughout the course of the year … something brief during the work hours. Would that yield a better result? So that was the whole basis genesis for starting the fun dept. I just believe in my soul — it’s what I’ve been doing all these years — that people need these little restorative breaks at work and it does lead to a more productive, happier, healthier workplace.

Bruce: What fun does for grind and buried in our task lists, and we get burned out, we get stressed. The way that we encourage people to have fun really helps to reenergize, to refocus, and make you that much more productive.

QCoworker bonding in the before times often centered on birthday cake in the office, or happy hours after work. But not everyone likes to go out drinking and apparently cake in the office is bad for us. Are there other, more inclusive ways to bond?

GIANOULIS >> We design activities that everybody can play, even when it’s a mild physical challenge. We teach people to do that, too. Virtual tends to be clean and safe.

The things that we encourage people to do, there’s not a meal involved. We decided to make things just on company time, no drinking.

BRUCE >> We really encourage people to schedule fun on company time. After-work happy hours, weekend or evening events cut into personal time that people value. If you can just do some shorter, more consistent scheduled time while people are normally working, you’re gonna get a lot of benefits from that, and it really does recharge them. That 15 or 20 minutes makes the rest of their day, the rest of their week, the rest of their month more productive. So I would argue that those 15 or 20 minutes are well worth it.