Positive play coach Jeff Harry is the person behind Rediscover Your Play. Jeff combines play and positive psychology to help teams build psychological safety as well as helping individuals embrace a play-oriented approach enabling them to address some of their biggest work challenges. Jeff truly believes play can heal the world and is currently focusing his work on healing the workplace.
He has worked with some of the world’s biggest companies: Microsoft, Google, Southwest Airlines, Amazon, and the NFL, assisting these organizations to inspire more play into their respective work environments. Jeff also created the Fun, Joy, Play (FJP) Index to help individuals find more fun, joy, and play in their life.
1) When you first introduce someone to what you do, what is a misconception regarding fun and play you find yourself continuingly having to explain?
That play is somehow frivolous. That it is unnecessary and a waste of time. That it’s not going to garner the results that are promised. My response to that typically is, I quote Alex Johnson, “The future is where people are having the most fun.” If you look at the most innovative companies, you look at organizations that are thriving, the ones that are best navigating uncertainty; these are the ones that are willing to take risks and explore fun ideas.
Therefore, when people are like, “What proof do you have that play actually works?” I reference Google’s 20% rule. I don’t think they have it anymore. Still, when they implemented it initially, they were giving their staff a fifth of their time to pursue whatever was their curiosity, as long as it helped Google, what came out of the Google 20% program: AdSense, Gmail, Google News, Google Meet—foundations of the organization were built from allowing their staff to have fun, allowing their staff to play in a certain sandbox (with certain boundaries, of course).
I’m not saying, “You have to be playing all the time.” My argument about playing at work has nothing to do with actual play, right? I don’t really care if you have a ping pong table. I don’t really care if you do happy hour or escape from a room. I don’t even really consider those things play. I consider those things forced fun. For me, it’s more like when someone says, “We always have our meetings in this room. Why don’t we do them while we’re walking?” It’s a play-oriented perspective. It’s a growth-oriented perspective.
2) You have created the Fun, Joy, Play (FJP) Index. For those unfamiliar, what’s the concept, and how can one apply it themselves?
The concept is that after three weeks, most people give up their New Year’s resolutions. Since resolutions don’t work, it got me thinking: At the end of my life, what am I going to be measuring? Am I going to be measuring my accomplishments? Am I going to be measuring how much money I made? Am I going to be measuring how many awards I received? Or is it going to be moments? It’s going to be moments, right? So, what are those fun, joy, and play moments that make up your year that are so satisfying that you want to have more of those moments.
I came up with a bunch of questions: When did you smile the most? When did you laugh the most, and who were you surrounded by? What was one of your most inspiring moments of the year? What was one of your most mind-blowing adventures?
Just these curious questions to reflect back on the previous year. After you reflect, then recognize, okay, I want to do more of those. So let me be deliberate about it. Documenting things like: These are the people I liked hanging out with. These are the people that I laughed the most with. Then setting up more opportunities to do those things and hang out with the people that make life worth living. Why are we not focused on that? That’s what the Fun, Joy, Play index is.
Now, I even log my Fun, Joy, Play moments each month as they’re happening to look back at them and be like, “Oh, that was a great month.” Because I think a lot of times we don’t even know, we’re like, “Man, two months have already passed. What’s happened?” Go back and actually reflect on the moments. Savor those moments.
3) One of the challenges of shared fun at work is inclusion. There is the opportunity for selection through shared interests when it comes to friendship—work is a different story. Finding common footing can be more challenging in a work environment. What have you discovered works best in fostering fun and play in a group dynamic where there is a diverse and varying appetite for what people find pleasurable?
First and foremost: don’t force it. Right? I ask managers, have you created a psychologically safe workspace so that people can even play and have fun? When was the last hard conversation you had with your staff? What hard conversations do you have with your staff? Can you even have those conversations? Because if you’re having those conversations and there’s trust already built, the fun just starts to happen organically.
Say you’re at a meeting. You can measure joy and trust at that meeting simply by observing how much laughing is happening. Is there enough trust that people can joke? If you don’t have that dynamic, then you are coming in and being like, “All right, everyone, you like ping pong, let’s play ping pong.” It doesn’t even matter if they like what you’re trying to do if they don’t like each other. Now you’re trying to force connection, and that type of connection can’t be forced.
It’s really about the manager building a relationship with each staff member. Understanding their language of appreciation and building that level of trust—so that each staffer knows that the manager truly cares. Not just cares so they can get something out of them, but cares just in general, like, “Oh, this person’s watching out for me just because they’re a good human being.” We forget how basic that is. If you haven’t done that, you’re skipping a step and thinking, “Oh, let’s start having fun because that’s what I was told I should do.”
4) If fun within a group dynamic proves elusive on the job, how can one still find joy in their work using their own agency and autonomy?
Look at all the work that you do in your 40-to-50-hour workweek. You have your work of Gay Hendricks that breaks it down: You have your work that’s your zone of incompetence, things you suck at. Your zone of competence, things you’re average at. Then you have your zone of excellence, things you’re really good at. You get a lot of good praise for, but you don’t really care either way. And then it’s like, let’s identify, what is your zone of genius? What’s the work where you forget about time? What’s your “flow” work? What’s your work where if someone were not paying, you’d probably still just do this work anyway, because that’s just who you are?
Identify what percentage of that work exists at your job. If none of it exists at your job, maybe that’s not the right job for you. If it does exist, though, even if it’s only five or ten percent of your day, studies have found that when you do that work, especially to start your day, you’re five times more productive with all of the other work you do. So, identifying what that zone of genius is for you—that flow work—is crucial to bringing you more joy and happiness.
5) There is an undeniable growing interest in fun and play. Given that folks are now more receptive than ever to the message, what are your aspirations for using your work to make an impact in the years ahead?
This is corny, but I believe this: play can heal the world. I really feel like it can heal divisions; it can heal trauma. Right now, I’m focused on how play can heal the workplace. I believe there was a lot of distrust and trauma built up before the pandemic and then revealed during the pandemic. We are at a crossroads where we must decide what type of leadership we want to celebrate going forward. Are we willing to now celebrate a much more balanced leadership style—rooted in empathy, shared humanity, and compassion?
I want to be part of that. I want to be part of creating a more sustainable work environment. As a manager, part of your job is to make sure people feel connected. The Great Resignation is not just because people are not getting paid enough. They’re quitting because they feel exploited, used and disengaged from work, and disengaged from each other.
Many don’t get the part about play, where play is a choice. We’re not giving people a choice. It is hard to play at work because when your manager goes, “Hey, you got to play,” well, of course, you listen because that’s your manager telling you to do something, but it’s forced fun. And that’s not how play actually works. You’ve already destroyed it. You’ve destroyed play’s organic nature. It reminds me of when I was a child at the playground, and a parent would run over and say, “Hey, you’re having fun?” Ironically, didn’t that stop the fun?
So it is with work. “We’re going to sit in this meeting until we don’t feel trapped.” Okay, great. Whenever I hear someone say, “Our work team just had ‘fun,’ we did an escape from the room thingy.” I ask, “Do you like any of those people?” No. Oh, and now you were stuck in a room with them. We need to do better.
I aspire to help organizations do better through true forms of play.
