Fun Works: Creating Places Where People Love to Work (Second Edition, Updated and Expanded)

Is it possible to have fun...at work? We spend more time at work than at any other single activity in our lives, but most of us feel that we can't—or shouldn't—have fun in the workplace. It's superficial, unprofessional, and counterproductive. It's something that should exist only after work is completed. Or so we thought.

In Fun Works: Creating Places Where People Love to Work, author Leslie Yerkes disposes of the myth that fun and work are mutually exclusive. While most of us do not know how to integrate the two, there are some people who love their jobs, who love to go to work, who get great value out of the experience and put great value into the at-work experience at the same time. In fact, organizations can use fun to increase employee and customer retention, motivate individuals and teams, and even improve overall productivity.

Yerkes details precisely how 11 different companies integrate fun into the normal course of business and shows how this translates into improved results across the board. Looking at places like Southwest Airlines, Pike Place Fish, and Prudential, she demonstrates 11 Principles of Fun/Work Fusion and offers thoughtful advice on how to put these principles into practice.



For this revised second edition, Yerkes conducted follow-up interviews with all the companies in the first edition to see how they have managed to maintain prosperous and fun environments in the face of recession, national tragedy, and natural disaster. She was thrilled to discover that all of the original 11 companies have continued to thrive—that not one of them was "done in" by having a culture of "fun and work." If anything, she believes it is the combination of business smarts and positive culture that allowed each company to maintain its position, stay in business, and grow.

Creating places where people love to work is about creating a culture where individuals can freely bring the best of their whole selves to work each day. This book will show you how to do so.

Leslie Yerkes is the president of Catalyst Consulting Group. She is the coauthor of the bestselling books 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work, Beans: Four Principles for Running a Business in Good Times or Bad, and They Just Don't Get It! Changing Resistance into Understanding.