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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SAS is contrarian in another way. When most software companies were downsizing, SAS was hiring programmers and salespeople. Its employee rolls expanded 6% in 2001 and 8.5% last year. "A lot of good people were on the street looking for jobs, so we decided it was a good time to hire," Goodnight says. Growth is fun too.

It may sound a little devious, snowing people into believing you're being nice to them when really you just want to coax them back to the mill. But employees at SAS aren't that jaded. Maybe it's the free M&Ms;, the twice-weekly, on-site discounted car detailing, the art classes, the yoga and the in-house artist. Or maybe everyone just drank the Kool-Aid. But the employees genuinely talk about having fun at work. "If I want M&Ms;, I can go to the store," notes Oliver Schabenberger, a software developer. What he values, rather, is a culture that gives him the time and freedom to think and create and collaborate with colleagues from other departments. There isn't a lot of hierarchy at SAS or rigid rules and structures, so researchers are free to do what they like. It's not Foosball. But it's fun.

The companies that value fun are those with enough smarts to see that a fun culture is aligned with their business. Such a fit is obvious at a company that designs games, so when Bob Moog, fresh out of Stanford Business School, started University Games in 1985, he made one of his goals to have fun every day. Over the years, he has taken employees on a cross-country Amtrak murder-mystery tour and flown employees to Los Angeles to watch tapings of TV shows and participate in game shows. When the company faced a cash-flow crisis in the early 1990s, he took them all to Las Vegas, gave each of them about $100 (from two cartoonish bags painted with dollar signs) to gamble away, ostensibly to help earn money for end-of-the-year bonuses. It was a joke, but one that made light of a stressful situation.

After five years, employees are given a month off with pay to do whatever they want. The only rule: they can't check their e-mail or call work. "It's part of an informal social contract between managers, employees and shareholders," says Moog. "People need to have a balance between their home and family and work."

The firm's San Francisco headquarters is festooned with games a giant Pinocchio marionette, a glow-in-the-dark walk-through cave and a secret bookshelf that opens into another room, like something out of the old TV spy sitcom Get Smart. "We try to inject fun into everything we do," says Moog.

The best part and the part that should appeal to the thank-God-it's-Friday working stiff is that having fun pays off for everyone. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Business School, thinks executives like Zimmer at Men's Wearhouse are nothing short of brilliant. "If you have a bunch of surly employees who would rather have a proctological exam than wait on you, then you won't want to shop in the store," he says. "It's hard to build and maintain a positive culture."

Which is why Zimmer is willing to spend big bucks on Christmas parties and retreats and an extra $100 here or there to make his employees happy. Last year the company even flew employees and their spouses from Oklahoma City, Okla., to a party in Kansas City, Mo., because their store was too small to have its own. "We closed the store, flew up there and stayed in a nice hotel," says Dan Johnston, the Oklahoma City store manager. "Amazing they did that." Sure, it cost a few bucks, but guess what? For weeks after that party, sales of suits in Oklahoma City soared.