One of the many pleasures of watching "Mad Men", a television drama about the advertising industry in the early 1960s, is examining the ways in which office life has changed over the years. One obvious change makes people feel good about themselves: they no longer treat women as second-class citizens. But the other obvious change makes them feel a bit more uneasy, they have lost the art of enjoying themselves at work.
The ad-men in those days enjoyed pleasures. They puffed away at their desks. They drank throughout the day. They had affairs with their colleagues. They socialised not in order to bond, but in order to get drunk.
These clays many companies are obsessed with fun. Software firms in Silicon Valley have installed rock-climbing walls in their reception areas and put inflatable animals in their offices. Wal-Mart orders its cashiers to smile at all and sundry. The cult of fun has spread like some disgusting haemorrhagic disease. Acclaris, an American IT company, has a "chief fun officer". TD Bank, the American arm of Canada’s Toronto Dominion, has a "Wow!" department that dispatches costume-clad teams to "surprise and delight" successful workers. Red Bull, a drinks firm, has installed a slide in its London office.
Fun at work is becoming a business in its own right. Madan Kataria, an Indian who styles himself the "guru of giggling", sells "laughter yoga" to corporate s. Fun at Work, a British company, offers you "more hilarity than you can handle", including replacing your receptionists with "Ab Fab" lookalikes. Chiswick Park, an office development in London, brands itself with the slogan "enjoy-work", and hosts lunchtime s such as sheep-shearing and geese-herding.
The cult of fun is deepening as well as widening. Google is the acknowledged champion: its offices are blessed with volleyball courts, bicycle paths, a yellow brick road, a model dinosaur, regular s of roller hockey and several professional masseuses. But now two other companies have challenged Google for the jester’s crown—Twitter, a microblogging service, and Zappos, an online shoe-shop.
This cult of fun is driven by three of the most popular management fads of the moment: empowerment, engagement and creativity. Many companies pride themselves on devolving power to front-line workers. But surveys show that only 20% of workers are "fully engaged with their job". Even fewer are creative. Managers hope that "fun" will magically make workers more engaged and creative. But the problem is that as soon as fun becomes part of a corporate strategy it ceases to be fun and becomes its opposite—at best an empty shell and at worst a tiresome imposition.
The vogue of having fun at work is