Almost always after a long day or busy week at Marana Consulting Group (Marana), there will be a text message or a question at the end of a conversation with Sarah, “are you having fun?”
Even after two years now and the regular “are you having fun?” check in, I still stop, pause, and reflect – am I having fun – what does it mean to have fun at work?
Fun at work can have different meanings for different people. It can range from having a relaxed and positive work environment to engaging in activities that promote creativity and social interaction among team members. For some, it may mean having a sense of purpose and fulfilment in their work, while for others it may mean being able to have a good laugh and not take themselves too seriously. According to the Six Seconds Team Vitality Report 2022, measuring employee engagement is important because it can provide insight into an employee’s level of fun and job satisfaction. When it comes to creating fun in the workplace “Companies often conflate and confuse the material markers with human experience. Toys and perks are things; joy is an emotion.” The report goes on to make the following important points:
Teams that experience joy are more than 10 x as likely to be high achieving and satisfied with their work. This correlation between enjoying work and performance was revealed under the stress of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is even more important for teams to prioritise joy. Since 2019, this correlation between JOY and RESULTS / SATISFACTION has become stronger every year.
Joy is one of the pulse points for effective teamwork because joy is an emotional signal of high energy and opportunity.
It means People Leaders are required to gain new awareness and skill in focusing on people’s moods. It’s another reason leading companies equip managers with emotional intelligence skills. Top performing leaders know to ensure every team includes people passionate about the work at hand, and not just those with technical expertise.
The newest neuroscientific research reveals that anxiety, frustration and boredom drive our brains to produce chemicals that reduce key capabilities to reflect and create meaning. This reduces our thinking potential.
Regardless of the specific definition, having fun at work can contribute to increased motivation, productivity, and overall job satisfaction. It can help to reduce stress and create a positive workplace culture where individuals feel valued and supported.
“The workshops were tailored to our business, hit the nail on the head in terms of the brief and delivered some great outcomes that helped shape some huge improvements in our service delivery, commitment to our customers and some positive change in how my leaders lead their teams.”
Testimonial from our Local Government – Leisure and Aquatics client regarding the recent training program designed and delivered by Marana.
Our Client
Our client provides Leisure and Aquatics facilities across multiple locations in their local government area. Visitors of all ages are welcomed and programs and services are offered including learn to swim, aquatic facilities, fitness classes, gym services and a golf course.
The Challenge
The Executive Team have a comprehensive direction and strategic plan for the Leisure and Aquatics facilities and required practical skills to support People Leaders and staff to lead and drive change. Part of the strategic direction is to have a Customer Experience Culture at the core of everything Leisure and Aquatics do.
It was identified that some staff may require assistance with adjusting to and embracing culture change including new ways of working. People Leaders needed the skills and knowledge to lead and drive change and staff would require the skills and understanding to implement this into both internal and external customer interactions.
Some of the key challenges were:
Mystery Shopper survey results revealed that customers wanted staff to be able to assist with their enquiries at the first instance. Staff were accustomed to helping only with enquiries for their section, and weren’t working as a whole team across the Aquatics and Leisure Team.
Staff understanding the importance of taking ownership for consistent service delivery and how their interactions reflect the Council as a whole. It is important to promote that Leisure and Aquatics are not separate to Council, they are Council.
People Leaders required the practical skills and knowledge to create, develop and maintain a Customer Experience Culture. This includes being able to facilitate difficult conversations with staff when actions or behaviour were not in line with agreed expectations.
Staff required understanding of how Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) fit in with the bigger picture and People Leaders required skills to measure the quality of customer experience / service and how to effectively use measures to support a positive customer experience culture.
The Customer Experience Charter was identified as outdated and required revising to underpin the Customer Experience Culture change.
The Solution
For People Leaders this consisted of a two-day Leading a Customer Experience Culture program that was designed to support participants to lead, champion, develop and maintain a customer experience culture.
During the program People Leaders developed skills in identifying customer expectations and linking these to the Customer Service Charter, working with and measuring KPIs, understanding change management, skills to praise and recognise staff as well as how to provide redirection when standards are not being met. It also included the importance of being detailed and specific when providing feedback related to service delivery.
Over the past few years there has been a growing demand for more flexible work arrangements – and then came Covid-19. Very quickly most of us had to work from home full-time and adapt to remote working. Now with people increasingly returning to the office, it is clear flexible working has become the new “normal” and it is a huge incentive to attract talent and maintain the workforce.
At Marana we adopted flexible working practices a number of years ago and along the way we have learned how to make it work for us. We are now working with clients to make their adoption of flexible work practices a success for staff, teams and the organisation and its customers and/or clients.
Beyond complying with legal issues, our recent experiences with clients suggests the following approaches make flexible working positive for everyone.
1. Decide which flexible options the organisation and its work can support and then develop a Flexible Working Policy and communicate it to staff. For many organisations, it may not be possible to have everyone work from home all the time and it’s unlikely you cannot have some of your staff work flexibly. It is important the Policy outlines who can apply for flexible work and what arrangements can be adopted, how to apply, what the decision-making process for an application will be and how it will be monitored and reviewed. The Policy helps managers and staff understand the process and the reasoning behind decisions made and assists in achieving a consistent approach.
2. Have a transparent flexible work assessment system that can review which parts of the job can be performed remotely and which in the office or workplace. It will be important to consider the deliverables or outputs of people’s work and the customer’s or client’s needs in this. It is essential for you to have coverage for client-facing work.
3. Check whether you have the systems and technology to support the arrangements you want, including methods for knowledge transfer and training. Staff may need additional hardware for working remotely and some may require additional strategies and support when poor internet connection impacts productivity. This is especially the case for some parts of regional NSW – staff often tell us about their “technology rage”!
What have been the main issues organisations have had to manage in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic?
Most organisations were able to adapt to the challenges exceptionally well. This was, in the most part, attributed to collaborative leadership and a willingness from staff to learn and adapt quickly. In the early days of the pandemic, we received some calls from clients, checking in and we were a sounding board for some. Hearing how they were facing the challenges was inspiring especially in regional areas of NSW, where clients were in the midst of dealing with the aftermath of bushfires and floods.
Leading up to COVID-19, some State Government clients were moving towards flexible ways of working in agile shared spaces and were negotiating the hurdles that this change presented. COVID-19 created some sense of urgency facilitating a faster transition. A positive outcome for organisations and their staff.
We work with organisations who have staff predominantly working in the front-line interacting with customers. At an organisational level, clients were having to navigate the government guidelines which were changing regularly. Staff were then having to quickly adapt their interactions to ensure both physical and psychological safety, whilst also having to enforce regulations, deal with non-compliance issues and manage customer expectations.
Whilst everyone was digging deep, the challenges were more evident around October. People Leaders were expressing their concerns that they and their staff were exhausted. Then in December, with the second wave, lockdown and restrictions, people had to cancel much needed holiday breaks. This has presented some challenges in early 2021. Some staff are still very fatigued and are finding it hard to “switch-off” in a constant “switched-on” culture.
What advice do you have in terms of skills needed by employees to thrive in the current work environment?
The past year has certainly thrown up some challenges and now that we are returning to offices and interacting more closely with each other, it has led to a few tricky situations arising when someone sneezes or coughs at work.
A client recently mentioned that her young son coughed in the supermarket (he swallowed some food too quickly!) and said she was met with glares and some mutterings about COVID from shoppers nearby. At a recent workshop, a participant commented about a team member repeatedly sneezing in the office. That team member suffers from hay fever and hadn’t taken an antihistamine drug that day. No-one in their team knew what to say or how to broach the questions on everyone’s mind at the time – “Have they had a COVID test? Should they go home? Who is monitoring this?”
