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The Service Industries Journal


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http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsij20

Managing Services: Should We Be Having Fun?


T. Redman & B.P. Mathews
Published online: 08 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: T. Redman & B.P. Mathews (2002) Managing Services: Should We Be Having Fun?, The Service Industries
Journal, 22:3, 51-62

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/714005085

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223sij04.qxd 16/05/02 14:43 Page 51

Managing Services:
Should We Be Having Fun?

TO M R E D M A N and B R I A N P. M AT H E W S

The encouragement of ‘fun’ at work has recently received


attention in the literature. Fun is said to have many
organisational benefits, including improved morale, productivity
and bottom line gains. Little, if anything is put forward as
potential difficulties faced by a fun strategy. This article reports
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on a case study of a retail organisation that built fun into the way
the business was run. While some evidence is found in support of
the potential benefits a number of problems also emerge.

INTRODUCTION

There is a growing interest in the view that when employees have fun there
are distinct individual and organisational benefits to be gained. Often,
especially in the more popular management literature, a great deal is
claimed for fun. After detailing the benefits attributed to fun we examine the
wider literature on the subject to explore the ‘how’ and ‘why’ issues to
illuminate a variety of the aspects of fun in practice and attempt to identify
the underlying managerial philosophy. The second major section of the
article is devoted to an in-depth case analysis of a UK service organisation
that adopted fun as part of its overall business strategy.
Simply having fun at work is claimed to be sufficient to increase
productivity and job satisfaction, improve creativity, reduce absenteeism
and stress, improve interpersonal skills, enhance group cohesion, empower
staff and accelerate organisational learning [Stewart, 1996; Matthes, 1993].
According to Barsoux [1993] fun can make an organisation more
participative and responsive, generate more organisational energy, dispel
nervousness, and enhance team spirit and diffuse conflict. In essences it
‘humanises’ the organisation [Barsoux, 1993: 76]. For Watson [1994]

Tom Redman is Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at the Durham Business
School, University of Durham, Mill Hill Lane, Durham City DH1 3LB. Brian Mathews is
Professor of Marketing at the Luton Business School, University of Luton, Park Square, Luton
LU1 3JU.
The Service Industries Journal, Vol.22, No.3 (July 2002), pp.51–62
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
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52 T H E S E RV I C E I N D U S T R I E S J O U R N A L

humour ‘lubricates’ some of the tricky organisational issues managers must


deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Others describe gains from creating a fun culture at work that are more
indirect, via the ‘building a strong sense of community and
counterbalancing the stress of hard work and competition’ [Sunoo, 1995].
Williford [1996] claims both bottom line and ‘softer’ benefits. Even some
of the most respected management gurus now view fun as being
indispensable for organisations seeking sustainable competitive advantage
and many prescriptive writers on organisational culture emphasise the need
to have fun at work [for example, Deal and Kennedy, 1999]. According to
Kanter fun is now the fifth ‘F’ (with the others being focus, fastness,
friendliness and flexibility) that successful organisations must practice. Fun
is indeed the key for Kanter [1991] – ‘If it’s not fun in a company the rest
(of the Fs) cannot apply’.
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Fun, it seems is no laughing matter and is a very serious business issue.

Fun at work
A well-developed ‘fun industry’ is emerging to supply would-be funsters
with advice, workshops and consultancy on making work more fun. There
are now many business books [for example, MacErlean, 1998, Greenwhich,
1997; Hemsath et al., 1997; Firth, 1995; Metcalf, 1992] solely dedicated to
advising managers how to make work life more fun for their staff. There is
also a growing management consultancy sector with specialist corporate
entertainment companies and ‘humour consultants’ [Gibson, 1994]. Fornary
[1996] reports how consultants provide services such as ‘humour relations
workshops’ for senior managers who have ‘mislaid’ their sense of fun. CDs,
audio tapes, web-sites dedicated to fun, and software such as SMILE
(Subjective Multidimensional Interactive Laughter Evaluation) are now
available to encourage fun at work [Leo, 1999]. No organisational practice,
it seems, cannot be ‘improved’ by an injection of fun. Caudron [1992]
reports how some US companies have even conducted downsizing exercises
in a ‘fun’ way (lampooning memos titled ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Company’).
Fun it appears may now even be a ‘core competence’ for sustainable
competitive advantage. In part this may now be a requirement for success in
the modern corporation given the work values of the current generation of
employees. Some commentators have suggested that making the working
environment a fun place is a key requirement of motivating ‘Generation X’
employees [Tulgan, 1996]. Such employees are not imbued with the same
depth of ‘paying your dues’ work ethics of the previous generation [Romano,
1994]. For example, fun is seen as a key component of success at one of the
UK’s business success stories of the 1990s, the Virgin empire of Richard
Branson. Fun is one of Virgin’s ‘four principal ideas’ (along with quality,
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M ANAGING SERVI CES: SHOULD W E BE H AV I N G F U N ? 53


value for money and innovation). Increasingly fun is being emphasised in
organisational culture change programmes, often elevated to the same levels
of espoused importance as profit, innovation etc. In the recent culture change
programme at Bull Information Systems the company’s desired values were
expressed in the mnemonic PROFIT – partnership, respect, ownership, fun,
innovation and trust – [Allen and Thatcher, 1995].
Some very successful companies are argued to owe at least part of their
success to actively incorporating fun into everyday work practices. The
philosophy of Southwest Airlines, one of the most widely quoted ‘fun’
companies, is to make flying ‘cheap, fast and fun’ [Stewart, 1996]. In
practical terms this means the company aims to provide customers with low
airfares, frequent and dependable flights, and high quality, friendly and
humorous service. Thus the success of Southwest Airlines has been
attributed to filling a strategic niche within the airline industry and to its
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unique selling point, one that has been difficult to imitate by its competitors,
the provision of a high quality customer service based on fun [Frieberg and
Frieberg, 1998; Milliman et al., 1999]. The company sees its mission to
provide ‘Positively Outrageous Service’ which in turn requires ‘Positively
Outrageous Spirit’ from its employees [Sunoo, 1995]. Having fun at work
in turn is seen as the way to attain this spirit. Fun at Southwest manifests
itself in a wide variety of ways from dressing up days (for example, at
Halloween), staff telling jokes, playing harmonicas and singing to
customers, bunny-eared flight attendants popping out of the overhead
baggage compartments and putting rubber cockroaches in passenger drinks.
Staff, especially in US firms, are variously encouraged to have pillow
fights, water and squirt gun fights, use ventriloquist dummies to break bad
news to the board, have funny business cards, sets of clowns noses, engage
in belly dancing and of course karaoke, etc. [Anfunso, 1998]. Some
authorities are even setting laughter targets for employees with figures
ranging from 15 [Caudron, 1992] to 200 laughs, chortles or chuckles [Leo,
1999: 20] per day. An organisational architecture of fun is emerging.
Organisations have appointed fun managers and set up committees to
organise fun [Miller, 1996]. For example, one US food company has set up
a ‘fun committee’ whose role is simply to devise fun things for employees
to do [Flynn, 1996]. One of these was to ‘diffuse tensions’ by throwing
leftover cheesecake at (suitably protected) managers. Kodak has created a
‘humour room’ equipped with fun books, videos, software, a toy store etc.
where its employees can go for a ‘fun break’.
Steele [1992] describes the use of a fun approach to revitalising rather
staid HRM practices, such as combining cash benefits with interesting and
varied gifts to stimulate a suggestion scheme. As is often the case, suggestion
schemes ‘run out of steam’ despite their potential value to an organisation.
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54 T H E S E RV I C E I N D U S T R I E S J O U R N A L

He recounts the productive methods that incorporate fun into the scheme.
Here prize winners receive a cash payment, a humorous gift and ‘the coveted
SMART award (a specially designed trophy with a magic self-illuminating
light bulb)’ [p.96]. The gifts are, he maintains, a more effective motivator
and have a longer-term impact than the cash payments. Choice of gifts is
important and emphasises the fun element, for example a remote control
roaring dinosaur; coloured dancing tennis shoes and a child’s money-box in
the form of a robot that ate coins are cited as ‘memorable’ gifts. Such items
tend to be retained in the workplace rather than taken home.
The main problem with the claimed benefits of fun, or the
appropriateness of differing approaches to it, is that there is very little hard
evidence. Most, if not all, are based upon rather sketchy anecdotal accounts
rather than more rigorous enquiry. Here some of the more popular accounts
even deride the search for evidence-based links between fun and
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organisational performance as being the predilections of ‘humourless


bastards’ [Firth, 1995: 135]. At the risk of questioning our own parentage,
in this article we attempt to redress the balance somewhat. We challenge the
universal applicability of adopting fun in the service sector and illustrate a
range of issues involved in managing fun at work by drawing on evidence
from a case study of a retailing organisation that used a fun culture as a
major management initiative.

DIY HYPERMARKET GROUP: DO-IT-YOURSELF LAUGHS

This case study draws on a series of over 20 interviews with senior


managers (for example, HR manager, store managers etc.) middle and
junior managers (for example, business managers and departmental
supervisors) and four focus group interviews with front-line customer
service staff. The research took place over a three-year period. In addition,
company documentation such as newsletters and policy documents were
collected and analysed and observations recorded from many visits,
especially during scheduled ‘fun days’, to the company’s retail stores.
The company, until 1999 when it was bought out by a National chain, was
a family owned home improvement hypermarket group. It had five stores
and at its peak it employed over 1,050 full-time and part-time staff. A further
100 franchise staff worked from its stores. It was first established in 1878.
The principal store was claimed to be the first DIY hypermarket in Britain
and at the time of closure had nearly 200,000 square feet of retail space.
Customer service was the key to their business strategy. According to
one senior manager:
DIY Co aims not so much to be a home improvements retailer with
great customer service but a great customer service organisation that
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just happens to be a home improvements retailer. Customer service
drives everything we do here.
In addition their business strategy involved competitive pricing, aggressive
and extensive advertising, in particular the delivery of a tabloid news-sheet
to over 1 million households 15 times a year, and a large product range (over
100,000 different lines). They were, however, was somewhat ‘stuck in the
middle’ in terms of the size and scale of its operation. On the one hand it was
a small regional player compared to likes of Texas, Wickes and B&Q and
thus did not have the economies of scale these firms possessed to compete
head-on on cost leadership. Equally it did not have the branch coverage to
provide the accessibility that small, independent home improvement retailers
could offer. Thus, for them, the key to its success was providing a good range
of well priced products with outstanding customer service.
It is how their management set about achieving its desired customer
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service culture that is of interest to the concerns of this article. The company
culture management had two key inter-linked aspects, fun and empowerment.

Fun
The central concern of culture management, like many other retailers was to
attempt to obtain commitment to the company’s values of outstanding
customer service [for example, see Ogbonna and Wilkinson, 1988; Ogbonna
and Whipp, 1999]. All new management practices and initiatives were
expected to support this aim. However, what was distinctive about them was
the ‘fun’ way in which management set about achieving the desired culture
change. Developing a work culture that emphasised that serving customers
well was also a ‘fun’ thing to do was seen by senior managers’ as providing
a simple and effective way of attaining the necessary ‘emotional buy-in by
staff’ to the company’s business goals. In particular it would emphasise that
the staff’s interests and those of management were closely intertwined. Thus,
for everybody to attain the company’s business goals was a win-win
situation. Customers would get better services, the business would do better
and staff and management would benefit directly from this by improved job
security in a competitive climate and better terms and conditions as well as
improved job satisfaction. Thus senior management felt such a culture would
provide a way of emphasising, in classic unitary style, the need for managers
and staff to work closely together in order to fight off the intensifying
competition in the sector. Thus:
We wanted to build a fun culture at DIY Co to show our staff that we
were not just a bunch of stuffed suits. That we are human too. We feel
it builds a bond with our employees. It says to them we are all in this
together. DIY retailing is an intensely competitive business.
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56 T H E S E RV I C E I N D U S T R I E S J O U R N A L

We feel that by being able to have a laugh and a lark with our staff that
they identify with management more and in a fun way we get our
main business messages over much more effectively.
Thus the development of a fun culture had to start with the managers
themselves. Managers needed to publicly demonstrate to the shop floor that
they believed in the fun philosophy and that shop floor employees should
too.
At DIY Co, we take the competition very seriously, we have too – they
are on our doorstep – but we try not to take ourselves too seriously.
Senior managers expected their middle and junior mangers to be
enthusiastic about encouraging fun at work. Insufficient enthusiasm for fun
at work was not to be tolerated. Indeed not to be seen as a funster would
have a negative impact on your promotional prospects and could even be
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career threatening.
Our culture is one of work hard – play hard. We want staff who can
adapt to this way of working. We want this at all levels. We want it in
our front-line staff; we want those in the warehouse or the offices to
be the same. But we especially want our managers to fit this way of
working. If managers cannot adapt to this, what chance have we with
those lower down? In the past we have not always got it right and have
had to let some managers go. You know, ones that were reasonable at
the hard work bit but they were far too stuffy to adapt to the playing
hard bit. You know, going straight home after work every night. Such
behaviour is potentially career threatening here.
Having fun involved a wide range of activities. Often this included fancy
dress, singing to customers and events such as managers being locked into
sets of stocks for staff (and customers) to throw wet sponges at etc. Staff
communications were produced in a quirky and irreverent style, for
example in relation to providing advice on products to customers,
employees were encouraged to ‘KISS’ the customer or ‘Keep it Simple,
Stupid’. The company had many internal newsletters presented in a
humorous style. These publications took great delight in poking fun at
individual managers (photographs of senior managers with a request for
staff to add a humorous caption, spoof lonely hearts columns ‘shy but fun-
loving rich managing director requires similar’ etc.) but also at staff
generally. The various stories reported often emphasised the value of the
work-hard play-hard culture by stressing how considerable enjoyment was
had by all involved and the commercial value in improved sales arising
from a particular fun event.
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Those teams and departments that did not engage actively enough in a
particular fun event were reported in ‘hall of shame’ in the newsletters.
Each store had an active social club responsible for organising a wide range
of social activities such as nights out, weekends away, sporting events
(inter-departmental sports nights) and fun competitions (for example,
Krypton Factor, ‘look alike’, rude quizzes and rude vegetable competitions).
Individual and team ad hoc incentive awards were always ‘fun’ ones for
example, hiring a stretch limo for a night out, being presented with exotic
underwear, etc.
Customers too were invited to join in the fun in an attempt to make
shopping there ‘more like a leisure and less like a work-thing to do’
according to one store manger. Thus customers were encouraged to join in
fancy dress and other events. Here promotions such as ‘beddy-byes’ or ‘
bathroom nights’ had staff dressed up in short negligees, pyjamas and Silent
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Night Hippo costumes in the former case and in the latter swimming ware.
Customers who also dressed up to suit the particular promotion received
extra discounts. The garden centre ran a humorous radio phone-in
programme, the ‘Crazy Gardening Show’, in conjunction with a local radio
station. Parties were held, for example, at Christmas, during shop opening
times and customers invited to join in the fun. Customer Karaoke sessions,
with discounts for the best performance, were commonplace. Other events
for customers have included visits from ‘Mr Blobby’, sponsored car
washes, in store treasure hunts, theme days (1940s, Star Trek the Wizard of
Oz). The company was sensitive to the fact that these events may cause
offence to some of their more ‘straight’ customers. However, customer
feedback from fun activities via letters, surveys and ‘goalie’ data (goalies
were staff at exit points assigned to elicit direct customer feedback on the
particular fun event) was generally very supportive.
They also attempted to build a celebratory element into its culture for
those employees who go that ‘extra mile’ in customer service terms. It had
a wide range of ways of celebrating staff performance in customer service
from announcements in staff magazines, presentations on the shop floor,
employee of the month/year awards etc. Again all of these celebrations were
conducted in a fun way. For example, ad hoc cash awards for staff who have
performed well had to be put towards something they wanted to do as long
as ‘it is not serious’ and the ‘gotcha’. The ‘gotcha Oscar’ was an award
given when a member of staff was caught giving ‘wonderful customer
service’. For example, one delivery employee won the award when a
customer rang in to ask if the delivery driver could bring him 20 cigarettes
when he brought the items she had purchased from the company, due to be
delivered later that day. The gotcha was awarded to the employee for
arranging this.
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58 T H E S E RV I C E I N D U S T R I E S J O U R N A L

Some of the managers reacted enthusiastically to the fun culture and


perceived it to be both an effective way of managing staff and achieving the
company’s business objectives. The main advantages of fun were seen as
relieving the often intense stresses and strains of delivering high levels of
customer services, countering staff burnout, making the day go quicker, and
to a lesser extent ‘entertaining’ the customers.
Fun and having a laugh on the job is a way of life at DIY Co. By
constantly poking fun at ourselves, we feel we build a strong sense of
community at work. We think this acts to balance some of the stresses
associated with the hard work and competitive pressures of retailing.
This for us is the key to achieving high staff productivity, high
profitability and what DIY Co is all about, outstanding customer service.
Empty and drained employees cannot give us the customer service
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levels we need to survive in this business. We need employees that are


full of energy and enthusiasm. Our ability to have a laugh, have a bit of
fun at DIY Co helps reduce the pressures. It helps in providing that buzz,
that bit extra, it keeps you going during a long day. It energises you.
However, not all managers were coping with the new fun culture. Some
managers were struggling to develop a sense of fun in their staff and
described employees as reacting cynically to any ‘fun initiatives’ they tried.
They don’t not do what I ask them to do. But they just go though the
motions of doing it. They don’t put any real effort or enthusiasm in to
the little events I have tried. I feel they are deliberately making them
not work so they can turn round to me afterwards and say ‘Well, we
told you so – that was a complete waste of our time’.
Perhaps the danger we are finding here is that these managers had simply
tried too hard. The manager interviewed above had tried to foist so much
fun on to her increasingly resistant employees that cynicism was perhaps a
natural outcome. Employee resistance to having fun, especially when it was
seen as being ‘forced’ on them (‘somedays you just don’t feel like having
fun’, ‘it’s not really right that you should be told by management to have
fun’, ‘there is a limit to how much fun you can stomach sometimes’) was
building up amongst some employees. This was especially the case as the
competition hotted up amongst some managers to come up with ever more
new and ‘zany’ things to do to interject fun into the working day. Having
fun became too much like hard work for some employees and maybe there
was simply too much pressure to have fun at work.
Maintaining a fun culture was re-enforced by changes to the company’s
HRM practices. Their recruitment and selection process was one that
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M ANAGING SERVI CES: SHOULD W E BE H AV I N G F U N ? 59


emphasised the employee’s capacity for coping with their distinctive culture.
Employees according to the HR staff were recruited less on their experience,
skills and qualifications and more on their ‘attitude’, ‘interpersonal skills’,
‘passion’, ‘enthusiasm’, ‘spirit’, ‘heart’, ‘sense of humour’ and a ‘deep
commitment to customer service’. Recruitment advertisements have
requested ‘fun-loving people’ and noted that ‘qualifications were less
important than bags of oomph’. Customer service training was extensive in
the company and conducted in a ‘light-hearted’ and humorous way. Having
fun and being responsive to customer needs was emphasised in staff review
interviews and personal development planning. Career planning and
promotions, as we discuss above, were also linked to the fun culture.

Empowerment: Just-do-it
DIY Co was one of the first service companies in the UK to become
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interested in empowering its workforce. Well before the general interest in


empowerment in the UK, and before the term was widely used,
management was advocating a ‘just-do-it’ style of management. Many
formal rules and regulations were reviewed and disregarded, the managerial
structures were re-organised and de-layered and the scope of individual jobs
widened. Having an empowered and fun-orientated staff was seen as
mutually re-enforcing, one could not be attained without the other.
According to two business managers:
We decided it would be impossible to get the outcomes we wanted if
we were knee deep in rules and regulations etc. How could we get
staff having fun if they would be wondering whether doing something
cut across this or that rule.
Thus the ‘just-do-it’ (taken from the Nike adverts) approach came to be a
common mantra and was the oft quoted feedback to employees who came
forward with new ideas or suggestions to improve the bushiness. Thus:
We do not want employees who are frightened of making mistakes,
who live in fear of breaking a rule or being blamed when something
goes wrong.
Our biggest fear as a management is not that we will fail at something
that happens as a result of our just-do-it philosophy but that we will
become complacent – we are doing pretty well at the moment – that’s
why we try to prevent things getting stale. We are always trying new
things.
The just-do-it philosophy was occasionally sorely tested. For example
on one occasion an enthusiastic employee created havoc on the
computerised stock-holding listing by attempting to ‘improve’ a particular
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60 T H E S E RV I C E I N D U S T R I E S J O U R N A L

aspect of the stock ordering system and at times some employees abused its
potential for decreased direct managerial control. For example, the
company had to dismiss several groups of employees at a number of stores
who fraudulently manipulated customer discount arrangements and
customer return polices. At one store the entire cohort of modern
apprentices, the company’s managers of the future, where dismissed for
various fraudulent activities. At another store a training manager was
dismissed for conducting an extra-martial affair during company time whilst
ostensibly working at other sites. Such problems, although they had tainted
the empowerment regime and brought back calls for increased control from
some mangers, were seen by senior managers as being down to several ‘bad
apples’ and organisational deviants rather than a widespread problem with
the just-do-it philosophy. Nevertheless, the company’s problem with stock
shrinkage and wastage, reaching a peak of over a £1,000 per day in the
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gardening departments alone, suggests that there might have been deeper
problems than the management cared to admit to. Privately, that is, in non-
formal research settings, some managers were less guarded about the
problems of the fun culture and the just-do-it approach. For example:
To speak out against the management style here is seen as heresy. It’s
also dangerous. It’s seen as a good thing by senior management and
that’s that. I have my doubts. It could work if we could get better staff.
The problem is that senior management don’t see the staff I have to
work with.

CONCLUSIONS: THE LAST LAUGH

It is not very difficult to see why fun at work is now a popular managerial
discourse. Work has never before been so un-fun-like. Employees are
working longer hours than ever before and job insecurity and downsizing is
widespread. Workplace stress is rapidly increasing and new work problems
such as bullying are emerging. Fun it seems is much needed in many
workplaces but the hyper-competitive economic environment results in it
being neglected [Yokoyama, 1998]. Whether some of the practices of fun at
work described above can help alleviate the stresses and strains of modern
work-life is debatable.
The case illustrates some of the potential benefits of embracing fun in a
service business philosophy. In particular, in line with the claims of Sunoo
[1995] it did diffuse the high employee stress associated with exceptional
levels of customer service, thus countering ‘burnout’. It also made it a
relatively attractive place to work for the majority of staff. Many of the ‘fun’
events involving customers were commercially successful in addition to
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being well received by staff. Whether these bottom line benefits are as a
direct result of the fun culture [Williford, 1996] or from the innovative
promotional approach is less apparent.
It is clear from the case that fun and empowerment are complementary.
It emphasises the need for staff to be empowered in order to embrace the
demands of a fun culture. On the other hand, fun can also be seen as an
essential element of empowerment within this particular organisation.
Nevertheless, it becomes clear that adopting fun in a business culture is not
a simple bolt-on procedure.
The downside of embracing a fun culture seems to have been largely
overlooked by its proponents. Not all employees within an organisation
wish to be funsters. In the case, fun was introduced into a hitherto ‘normal’
organisational culture. It appears that a significant minority of front line
staff and managers found it difficult to cope with the new culture.
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While the case illustrates a wide range of the benefits that can be
achieved one significant message seems to be that out of control,
competitive fun has serious negative repercussions. This is well summed up
by a final quotation:
Sometimes it’s not much ******* fun to work for a fun company
(Building products employee interviewed at DIY hypermarket).
Thus, it appears that fun cannot be seen as the universally applicable ‘quick
fix’ that is suggested by the managerial literature. It is clear that to develop
a culture such as Southwest Airlines requires universal commitment from
staff, a HRM policy that supports it and a long term time horizon.
Equally, at the risk of being described as ‘humourless bastards’ [Firth,
1995: 135], we suggest the claims made for having fun at work need to be
further investigated with further rigour. Managers appear to have latched on
to having fun at work as a very cheap and sometimes cheerful way of
achieving a quick business fix. As such it runs the risk of going the way of
many management fads – something launched in a blaze of glory, or in this
case laughter, and then quietly fading away.
In sum, if fun as a free way of potentially improving organisational and
individual performance sounds too good to be true, it is probably because it
is too good to be true. However, we should be careful not to finish on too
pessimistic a note especially in an article about fun. Fun may have been
talked up and it seems very unlikely that it is capable of delivering all of the
benefits many writers claim for it. Nevertheless, the idea of the post-modern
manager as a corporate clown and the management consultant as the
corporate jester is not without its immediate appeal!
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62 T H E S E RV I C E I N D U S T R I E S J O U R N A L

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