When the going gets Tough, the tough get playing

There’s a big scary word starting R whispering around economic chatters these past few quarters. People who know things about economic things suggest Australia is at risk of recession this year. When inflation increases, cost of living pressures increase, job security reduces and stress increases. Makes sense that people are stressed at work, and that stress breeds stress in others. But, heres’s the thing - Gallup reports the relationship between employee engagement and business performance is somewhat stronger during economic recessions.

So, focus on engaging your teams and your business will do better.

Play is this! Play is enjoying the difficult task of learning. Authentic play is the way that high performing teams not only achieve their task, but surpass their goals through collaborating, innovating and creating cool new stuff.

Problem is, play has a bad name - if it’s not related to your work, or it’s not fun, it will not work to help engage your team and get more done. We wrote about the problem with play at work a few weeks ago. It’s a reputation problem, not an actual problem.

And, it needs to be safe enough to play with work for it to improve engagement with work. You can’t just throw stressed people into a ‘fun’ activity and expect it to change their relationship with work or pressure.

Ok, so how do you do it? Humans will naturally find ways to make work enjoyable if it’s safe enough to do so. That means, if it’s psychological safe enough to take the risk to do something playful with work, humans will. We prefer to enjoy ourselves, and we will do more of the things we enjoy. A cheat sheet to help you make it safe enough to play with work is to focus on the 3Rs.. not the big scary R, the Playgrounded 3Rs - relationships, rituals and reflection. Or, if you’ve got those 3Rs down pat, we have a Play workshop that helps you engage play in your work! 🎉