The Power of Play in the Workplace

I'd like to recommend that all managers read "The Power of Play: Fostering Creativity and Innovation in Libraries" by Kurt, Kurt and Medaille. Not just library managers, but anyone who wants to bring out the best in their staff.

The paper argues that although we try to recognise and encourage children, students (and library users in this case) to be creative through play and innovations, we rarely apply these same techniques in the workplace. To hold onto good, creative staff we need to provide a culture that motivates them, and providing room to play is one way of achieving this.

The paper profiles four companies with a strong play ethos: Google, 37Signals, IDEO and Pixar. (and who wouldn't want to work for Google or Pixar?). My favourite quote in the paper is from Kelley, the founder of IDEO (an innovation and design firm), who says:

"When people feel special, they'll perform beyond your wildest dreams."
(Kelley, 2001)

As much as I enjoyed the paper I wished it had provided more real-world examples of how to actually include play in everyday activities where resource and time are tight. I've taken and adapted a few from throughout the paper - and as you'd expect (!) I've taken the liberty of adding some of my own, hopefully applicable in a wide variety of settings:

1. Get your team to role-play as the customer/user to put themselves in their shoes. Or if possible, do some 'mystery shopping' exercises trying the service out as an unknown user.
2. Allow your staff to spend 20% of their time learning about and working on projects that interest them - anything goes as long as they feed their knowledge and experiences back into the team.
3. Go with wacky ideas if they make people happy and still allow you to achieve your aims - an excellent suggestion I saw this week (from @chriskeene) to apply targets and FourSquare style language to your email inbox, to beat yesterdays 'replied to' figure and aim to become 'Mayor of your Email' (please can someone build this as an Exchange add-on?)
4. When fire-fighting a technical problem - take a step back and go into Sherlock Holmes mode to re-evaluate the evidence with a fresh pair of eyes, and co-erce a colleague to play Watson to force yourself to express things clearly and verbally.
5. Set yourself targets throughout the day. A chocolate break when you've crossed two more things off your to-do list.
6. If working on a service desk, make Bingo-style cards for the team, and see who can collect five common surnames from users first, of a row of books with certain words in the titles etc.
   

What else? What do you do? And how do we overcome preconceptions that this is a waste of time and gather the evidence that shows playful adults are happier and more productive in the workplace.