LinkedIn is headlining “Enforced fun is never fun“.
I’ve attracted some undesired attention from a former employer because I voiced public support for the establishment of a union. I always said that if there was a union formed there, I’d be first in line. But let’s be real. I left there 4 years ago. My opinion means nothing on that issue!
But I’ll tell you a story (my way of saying some bits have been altered just to make it a better story) about enforced fun.
This place used to have 2x a year academic meetings. They’d start ~Tuesday (Monday for mid-level management) and finish Saturday after commencement. I still cringe to think that I was involved in that. You want your team to have a good time but there is just no escaping that the culture placed an emphasis on:
- Be in the right place,
- At the right time,
- Wearing the right clothes,
- Saying the right thing.
^ Enforced fun that I’m sorry to say I planned. But 3 thoughts on this:
1. Legos are SO expensive. Who decided that?
2. I went OUT OF MY WAY to make sure that a diverse set of lego people choices was available. In the end, that was a waste of all of my time and money.
3. I’ve learned my lesson. I no longer think that “fun” should be combined with work as the LinkedIn article suggests.
I’m also a veteran of how much teams don’t understand the word “optional” even when you over, over, over emphasize it.
I watched a team member limp through an “optional” excursion to Epcot as her strong pain meds wore off and she kept saying “I’m fine!” I’ve seen my team members apologize that they could not have “optional” dinner with me but wanted to go back to their hotel rooms for the evening.
Lesson: If employees think that their job gets a “bump up” for doing it, they will.
Indeed, mid-level managers were instructed to, if needed, walk the halls of the meeting space to MAKE SURE that all of our team members were in the right rooms all of the time (nevermind that that behavior puts these managers NOT in the rooms to hear what is being presented).
It was well known that a good way to get fired was to be SEEN in the wrong place at the wrong time at these academic meetings. I remember when 3 good mentors were spotted in the daytime in the hotel elevator smelling of alcohol. The fact that they were GOOD mentors is what barely kept them employed after that. Don’t get me started on the he said/she said rumors of who was seen in who’s hotel room.
But on the traditional Friday night, when I became a mid-level manager,
my mentor manager said “You wanna get outta here?” and I was like “YAAAAS!”
We started a tradition. The employer always offered a mexican-themed meal. But we hiked out as unseen as we could and would eat, on our own dimes/not putting in for reimbursement, some other place in town just to get away from the work culture. A drink or two might have been consumed.
Then we’d hustle back because we had to:
- Be in the right place,
- At the right time,
- Wearing the right clothes,
- Saying the right thing
for a mixer for 2 hours. That became an act of circulating just enough to be seen by one’s boss and then finding the right moment to leave. Believe me, employees did get in trouble if they were not in the room at the start of that mixer and if the room emptied out by 2 hours later, the employees NOT there had to have a good reason (like illness) to leave. The management was always clear that employees were required to be at certain events–no getting out of it. That created a bit of consternation because, for the 7 years I was in liberal arts/general education, we didn’t have ‘assigned’ student that were graduating but we still have to be in the room, standing around awkwardly hoping that a student would remember us from a few years prior and even though we had never met in person, come over and introduce themselves.
This all shows the trend to bleed non-work (fun) into work and vice versa isn’t the right place for it. (I have a 6 part article on Keeping Work In Its Place). As some are saying on LinkedIn, it’s fine to have fun at work or to be fun to work with. But when you force it, you’ve crossed a line.
I recently went to a business conference that started in the afternoon. At 4 p.m. the cash bar opened (which in 2022, I believe no longer accepts cash at all, it’s all a credit card thing). There were further sessions starting at 6:15 that ran until 8 p.m. and then a late dinner.
By 8:30 p.m. when I was scarfing down dinner because I was so hungry, I realized that I was very uncomfortable. Looking around, it was hard to find 1 or 2 others that weren’t drinking. (I had to drive that night, plus I was in another country facing border patrol coming back in the US. Ain’t nobody got time to mess with that.)
But I want to paint that canvas all the way out to the edges. There were ~400 attendees and I didn’t see:
- Any pregnant women not drinking. That is, no visibly pregnant women…and thus no women selecting non-alcohol drinks because of a medical condition.
- No one with a walker, cane, or wheelchair. That is no visibly disabled persons.
- VERY few with non-alcohol, as I said earlier. Picking a non-alcoholic drink, therefore, was difficult and had to be sought out.
The lack of diversity told me that I was in a homogeneous group. That made me very nervous. Heterogeneous groups are stronger and better in emergencies because of the multiple, diverse strengths (aka a hero might be among them). Haven’t you ever heard of “strength in diversity”? It is an interesting biological and Christian concept.
And thinking about it, it was a business conference. For all their propping of how great the conference is,
Supporting entrepreneurs, assisting with funding, and highlighting
up-and-coming entrepreneurs … this is a group worth celebrating.”
Blind people cannot just apply themselves harder to see.
People with unseen and different abilities cannot just apply themselves harder to not feel their lack of inclusion.
