I’ve said it before and I’ll continue to say it: if it’s fun, people will do it. When employees have fun at work, they are more engaged in their work responsibilities and they perform better on the job. In fact, I consider this leadership wisdom so important that in the past, I’ve offered five specific ways to create a fun, humour-filled workplace.
Still don’t believe me? Today, and in the next two instalments of the blog, I’m going to feature a series of experiments sponsored by Volkswagen that set out to prove this very hypothesis – “if it’s fun, people will do it.”
Experiment #1: The question posed was “Can we get more people to obey the speed limit by making it fun to do?”
Volkswagen, together with The Swedish National Society for Road Safety, actually put this into practice in Stockholm, Sweden and discovered that the answer was a resounding “yes”.
So, what does that mean for your workplace? What can you do to make unpopular tasks more fun? Can you turn them into contests with silly prizes? Tell us about what you’ve seen or heard that’s been successful. In a previous blog post, one commenter told us how he had different field departments compete to get their paperwork in on time; the prize: a can of Spam – don’t laugh, it worked!