Happy Mondays

Work and play.  They don’t have to be polar opposites, like love and war.  So what does it take to turn your job into a way of enjoying your life, rather than just a way of making a living?

By Kim Chaloner

The head of the company has a smile on his face.  He stands at the helm of the production line, regally surveying his domain of cogs and gears and conveyer belts.  The workers, too, are beaming from ear to ear.

Everywhere you look, you see the universal symbol for Happy Face: two black dots and an upward curve.  It’s a model of the cheerful workplace, where everyone willingly joins forces to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.  But these parts are Lego pieces, crafted from brightly coloured plastic, custom-designed to slot into the working environment with a pleasing click.  The question we need to ask is this: can human bosses and workers learned from their shining example?  Let’s find out.

In a room on the banks of a river outside Johannesburg, a team from a multinational corporation stands ready to get down to business.  They listen to the early-morning briefing, and then, on cue, they gather around the boardroom table.  But they’re not about to have a meeting.

There will be no PowerPoint presentation, no flip-charts, no spiral-bound reports to meander through.  Instead, they’re going to play.  Seriously.  Hands scramble into cardboard boxes, ripping open cellophane packets to get at the blocks and figurines within.  Click-click-click.

The marketing director meticulously arranges a jungle of palm trees at the feet of a lioness who is not roaring, but smiling.  The sales director, lips pursed in concentration, puts one block on top of another on top of another, and then crowns his skyscraper with a little man in a top-hat, bags of money in his hands.  The human resources manager delicately balances a female worker (smiling) on a seesaw otherwise occupied by male workers (also smiling).

Soon, everyone in the room has that little Lego smile on their face.  The activity at hand is Lego Serious Play, and it’s based on the notion that play can be just as effective a way of working as working itself.

“Play helps release thoughts that are locked in the head and heart,” says Brian Isaacson of Johannesburg, whose misleadingly earnest title is Lego Serious-Play Real-Time strategy facilitator.

“Play lets you experiment, explore and take risks with ideas without fearing consequences that might happen in ‘real life’.  We’ve found that people at play are more present, more engaged and more passionate, and that helps them perform better in the workplace.”

But wait a second.  Isn’t work supposed to be the polar opposite of play?  Isn’t what you do for a living supposed to give you the means to actually enjoy your life?  Isn’t life – real life, the life you look forward to – supposed to revolve around the stuff that happens before nine and after five?  For a lot of people, it’s the simple, bottomline truth: work is what you do because you have to, not because you want to.

“International surveys show that an absolute minority of people, as few as 10 precent, are truly happy in their work,” says Robert Gentle, a career consultant whose own quest to join that 10% has taken him from engineering and computer programming to journalism, scriptwriting and corporate training.  The name of his website says it all: www.Ihatemywork.co.za.

But Gentle loves his work, partly because it gives him an opportunity to each others to learn to love theirs.  “Nothing can make up for the debilitating effect of doing work we don’t enjoy,” says Gentle.  “There’s no love, enthusiasm or passion – just a grudging, teeth-grinding attempt to get through the day with your sanity intact.”

Gentle puts some of the blame on the corporate recruitment industry, which places a high premium on a candidate’s skills and competencies, and not enough on the underlying joys and motivations.

“Superior job performance, as anyone who’s ever had a star performer on their team will know, is a function of deep-seated drives that go beyond the narrow definition of talent,” says Gentle.  “It’s not enough to hire heads; you’ve got to hire hearts too.  It’s when you combine the two that you get the magic that produces passion, productivity and profit.”

Learning to love what you do may be hard work for some, but the key lies in seeing your work as something more than just a job.  “It’s part of human design that everyone has a calling,” says Gentle.  “If you can find what that is, and follow it, you won’t just see your job as 30 days of slog with a pay-cheque at the end.”

Let’s call on Richard Mulholland, a restless, intensely driven young man with spiky hair, a Punk Rock attitude and flames of red and blue ink shooting up his arms.  “Question Everything”, reads one of his more prominent tattoos, and it’s a philosophy he instinctively puts into practice.

A former rock ‘n roll road manager, Mulholland runs a small but fast-growing audiovisual presentation company called Missing Link from his office on the upper floor of a shopping centre northwest of Johannesburg.  Actually, it looks more like a teenager’s den than an office.

Like everyone else, Mulholland used to work from a chair at a desk, until the day he threw out that staid old piece of corporate furniture and replaced it with a queen-sized bed.

He now conducts business while perched on the bed, tapping away at his Apple PowerBook, leaping from one train of thought to another, grabbing a pen and scrawling diagrams in a notebook, jumping up, opening his door and calling out to a colleague over the hip-hop backbeat, with an energy and momentum that is far more suggestive of “play” than “work”.

Questioning the traditional notions of what these concepts really mean, he grabs a book from the bookshelf behind him and flips to a favourite quote by the author James Michener.

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labour and his leisure, his information and his recreation,” reads Mulholland, tapping the page with his finger for emphasis.  “He hardly knows which is which.  He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing.  To him, he is always doing both.”

Mulholland slams the book shut.  For sport, he plays in-line hockey, in the position of goalie.  For fitness, he does Kung Fu, using a no-blocking style called Tiger Sparring.  But for fun…he works.  And for work, he has fun.

He leads the way on a tour of his work-and-play environment, pointing out the dayglo-coloured graffiti wall, the table-soccer game, the reception area with its coffee-bar theme (you can order a cappucino or a macchiato or an espresso while you’re waiting to be ushered to Mulholland’s bed) before introducing his most shamelessly devoted member of staff, a Sony Aibo robotic dog named Higgins.

“Of course I sometimes get frustrated by my work,” says Mulholland. “But deep down, I can still get really turned on by what I’m doing.  If you don’t get a kick out of the end result of what you do, then you may as well admit you’re in the wrong job.” 

The point is echoed by Janis Berard, a Human Resources consultant based in Cape Town.  “Work has been given a bad rap,” she says. “There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be fun, and if it isn’t, you need to ask yourself  why, and see what you can do about it.  Work and play are not polar opposites, like love and war.”

To have fun at work, says Berard, you need to have a vision, enjoy a sense of camaraderie with your colleagues and have a healthy respect for each other’s abilities.  Work isn’t fun when you feel the challenge is beneath you, when it doesn’t engage your skills, and when you can’t see it leading to your growth and success.  An important component to loving what you do is being heard, and feeling that you belong.

Traditional corporate team-building – a weekend of abseiling in the mountains or a bos beraad at a luxury lodge – is only part of the answer.  You shouldn’t have to get away from work to enjoy the work you do.

Little things can make a difference: a subsidised monthly aromatherapy massage during working hours, a tray of muffins and croissants from the corner coffee-shop for that Monday-morning status meeting.

In your own workspace, you can start by organising and personalising your surroundings, celebrating your individuality and rewarding yourself for a job well done.  And try and find a reason to laugh, even when the going gets tough: a chuckle does wonders for your skin, heart rate and stress levels.

Ultimately, if you work in an environment that is pleasant and fun, you’re going to want to keep going. The art of making a living lies in learning to live well.  You might need to change your perceptions, you might need to change the way you work, you might even need to change your job. 

But if the payoff is a position that makes you look forward to Mondays, you too might leave for work with a smile on your face.

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