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Hello and welcome to Working It. I’m Bethan Staton, the FT’s deputy work and careers editor, standing in for Isabel this week. 

We are well and truly entering holiday season in the UK. I’m going to a tiny festival in Wales this weekend but will be spending most of the next few months working. Don’t pity me, though. London is the best when it’s warm, and being in the office will mean making headway with some important projects and working hard — while also making space for the summer spirit. 

But do we really need to wait for the summer to have fun at work? I don’t think so, and for this week’s newsletter I’ve been thinking about how to make our day-to-day more enjoyable. Read on for more — and if you have any recommendations about how to inject some delight into the 9 to 5 get in touch at bethan.staton@ft.com.

When is work not work? 

When did you last clock off at the end of the working day and think, that was fun? 

It’s not a trick question. Workplace fun is becoming a buzzword, alongside its relatives engagement, bring-your-whole-self and employee experience. I often read about it as a means to increase productivity or attract staff. But what if fun was central to how workplaces operated, not in service of another goal, but as an end in itself?

This seems less silly if we think creatively about what fun means — and it can mean a lot of things. I’ve never really been a fan of ping pong or zany away days, but I do think that work can and should be fun. That’s easy in journalism (what’s more fun than finding things out and writing about them!) but I speak to people in all sorts of professions — nurses and software engineers, accountants and restaurant workers — who genuinely enjoy their jobs and would agree that work is often fun.

Another person who agrees with this is Bree Groff, whose upcoming book Today Was Fun gets serious about workplace joy. When I spoke to her last week she described stuff like foosball and happy hours as “fun icing” — great to have but an addition to actual “cake of work”.

The cake is the important stuff: what you do all day, outputs, your team and how you interact with them. You can put a delicious icing on a bad cake, but it’s still going to taste bad (or people will lick off the icing) so it’s this core part of work that needs to be fun.

Groff doesn’t think this should be difficult. “There’s nothing fundamentally painful about creating value,” she says. It involves using our skills, building stuff, learning and getting feedback — all stuff that “should be enjoyable”. What stops work being fun are the artifices, formalities and pressures we unnecessarily bring to it. “There’s this notion that you have to show up in a certain way,” she tells me. “You wear your blazer, you use the jargon, you make your presentations look very respectable — but what that does is mute our vibrancy as creative beings.”

Returning some of that vibrancy, creating an environment in which we can enjoy ourselves, is Groff’s mission. She suggests leaders can do this by making fun of themselves; dressing more casually, or joking with the team. Presenting a rough sketch in a meeting rather than, say, getting the design department to pretty it up, shows a team that “they can be human here”. To put it most simply, Groff poses one very simple question: “Are you a good hang at work? Are you having fun?” 

I’m instinctively cautious of these kind of approaches, wondering if they’re still the icing of work, not the cake. Often we’re not having fun at work because we’re poorly paid, in hierarchies that deny us autonomy and punishing conditions, serving ends we don’t agree with.

But I also think there’s something important about putting joy at the centre of our working lives. Groff, a former physics teacher, defines work as “force x distance” — another way of saying “effort that makes a difference”. Good work should make a positive difference, but should also involve effort that is enjoyable, rewarding and well supported. And if we’re not having a good time, what’s the point?

Groff suggests a thought experiment: “You have a successful business with a good bottom line, and everyone’s miserable. I wouldn’t call that a good business. I don’t know if that business should exist.” If we are really to bring fun to work, she suggests what’s needed is nothing short of a “paradigm shift”. We can move from a situation where “we’re just extracting from each other . . . To one where the employee is happy to be delivering value.”

Five top stories from the world of work

  1. Why driverless vehicles just can’t quit humans: AI anxiety seems to be accelerating, but progress in actually phasing out people is unfolding in a less linear fashion, as this piece smartly explains.

  2. Networking hots up in the yoga studio: Forget Padel, there’s a new type-A networking activity in town. This time its more about mindful stretching, but with the temperature turned up you can still work up a sweat.

  3. Can Paris’ banking elite withstand a New York onslaught? France’s rural areas are grappling with a shortage of farmers, Paris has an overpopulation of bankers. The vicious consequent competition is far from droll.

  4. On-the-job learning upended by AI and hybrid work: One of the most worrying aspects of the march of AI is its effect on early career workers and the development of expertise — an area that is already being affected by remote working, poor management and cuts.

  5. Music investor Merck Mercuriadis plots comeback with Hipgnosis remix: Our leadership interview this week is with the controversial and tenacious founder of Hipgnosis, who is planning a new investment group that could transform the business of music afresh.

One more thing . . . 

Allegations about the circumstances surrounding the memoir The Salt Path have been one of the hottest topics of conversation in the newsroom this week. The accusations of misrepresentation come just after the reappearance of one of recent memory’s most high-profile literary fibbers: James Frey, who was shamed by Oprah after it emerged parts of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, had been fabricated. Frey’s new novel has received some terrible reviews, but I’ve enjoyed revisiting the story of his rise to fame, then descent into notoriety, in the light of the Salt Path.

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