Profiting From Fun

MARKHAM JOHNSON FOR TIME
University Games: This San Francisco company has taken employees on cross-country train trips

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Back in the dotcom boom days, Yahoo! was the model of the modern fun company. Why, they put an exclamation point at the end of the name just in case you missed the point that it was a crazy, happening place to work. Beer bashes every Friday. Skateboarding in the halls. Frisbee at lunchtime. This kind of culture was the epitome of the new economy, where the players worked hard and the workers played hard, all in a fuchsia-colored office turned Disneyland with all the caramel lattes you could swallow. There was oodles of money to be earned, even if the company didn't make a dime, and the best part was that you could have fun real adolescent, prankster, thumb-your-nose-at-the-principal kind of junior high school fun. "Hey, we're working, and it's a party!" is how an employee, laid off when his video-services group was axed, remembers the dominant workplace ethos.

And today? Well, uh, "people realized that making money wasn't actually that easy," says a mid-level Yahoo employee. "It has become a bit more corporate." Sure, company co-founder Jerry Yang and crew still let folks take the pet parakeet to work. They're still riding scooters up and down the hallways. You can get a chair massage and all the espresso you want which is an odd combination when you think about it. So it's still fun, sort of, or as the mid-level employee says, "It's not completely dry." Kind of like saying a party isn't totally boring. "Ninety-five percent of it was all about business and making money." Oh, that.

But these gloomy times may be exactly when fun is most needed, along with profit, when we all need to laugh a little. "Having fun doesn't mean denying reality," says Joni Johnston, a management consultant in Del Mar, Calif., who promotes workplace humor. "There's a time and place for humor," she says. "Having a clown dance around as you are laying off people isn't appropriate."

Media specialist Laura Kane worked at one of those happening places in the '90s, a West Coast advertising agency with high-tech clients. "Oh, we had it all the masseuse, bring your dog to work, the Foosball tables, video games," says Kane. "The wall of pictures in the entrance was of our employees all making funny faces. But you know what? It wasn't fun! People took themselves way too seriously." Most of us would envy the fun quotient at the places Kane has worked. She was a reader for a soap opera, a TV producer and a member of the team that started ESPN. So she knows from fun. And it's a bit of a shock to hear where she's having fun now an insurance company.

At AFLAC, the Columbus, Ga., insurance giant where she is manager of corporate communications, Kane has discovered that fun in the 21st century is defined differently from the way it was in the dotcom era. Sure, there are the perks, like on-site health care, dry cleaning, birthday parties with balloons, nature trails and take-out dinners that you actually would want to order.

But at companies that make a fun workplace an integral part of their culture, the emphasis isn't on freebies but on attitude. It's elusive, harder to define but ultimately more effective than all the flashy accoutrements that so many failed companies tried to throw at employees in fruitless attempts to retain them in a hot job market for really bad businesses.

"AFLAC was founded on the idea that if you treat employees well, they will take care of your customers and your business," says Kane. At AFLAC, that means loosening up the office, flooding the place with toy ducks that quack (the duck being the hook on the company's quirky advertising spots), giving workers flexible hours and making people feel comfortable about stepping away from their cubicles to walk around the duck pond.

The basic equation in question is this: Does work plus fun equal better productivity? To Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS Institute, a Cary, N.C., software developer, the answer is yes. "When we started the five of us our idea was, Why not make it fun?" Goodnight says. Yet he admits that sometimes he looks out the window, sees his programmers playing company-approved hooky, and asks, "How soon can we get those guys off the Frisbee field?"

Over the years, SAS has augmented fun perks with others that help employees save time. There's an on-site health clinic with four doctors and 20 nurses. "Instead of taking three hours out of work to go to the doctor, it takes 30 minutes," Goodnight says. The company figures the on-site health care saves it $2,000 per employee annually, because workers get to go to the doctor sooner when sick. The same rationale applies to the on-site barbershop, child-care center, gym and the staffer who arranges for care for elderly relatives. "Every minute I can save a person from doing these kinds of tasks means I get them back to their desk a minute sooner," says Goodnight. Assuming they're not playing Frisbee.