There is a mountain of research showing when you feel good about yourself, you tend to be more productive, time effective, and produce better quality communication and rapport with the people around you.
Feeling good is not just about your self esteem, but also trying to make your work more enjoyable and rewarding.
The 'Fun Theory' projects have found that by making mundane activities more fun, it can influence people's behaviour to do more of them. They found that by creating curiosity, challenge, and entertainment, people engaged more frequently in healthy activities (like walking up the stairs or putting rubbish in the bin, etc).
When you lose the challenge, the fun, or the sense of achieving in your work, everything starts to feel mundane and an effort. People report that they are more likely to change jobs when the fun or challenge disappears (or worse, stay in their current job and just complain more).
Through research on effective customer engagement, six important components have been identified that help organisations make activities fun, satisfying and successful:
- Curiosity: surprise and intrigue people
- Confidence: help people feel safe and smart
- Challenge: encourage people to do or learn something new
- Control: help people feel 'in charge'
- Play: encourage playfulness and sensory exploration
- Communication: stimulate meaningful conversations
What could you be doing to keep the energy, fun and challenge alive in your workplace? Here are two ideas:
Win Challenges
Everyone needs to feel a sense of accomplishment in their work. Ensure that you feel a sense of achievement every day. Amidst your regular work, ensure that you set smaller goals that you can accomplish each day.
Lighten Up
Look for the light side of situations. Life is designed to be fun, and we sometimes forget to 'funatise' what we do. Just because a situation is high pressure, it doesn't mean that you can't enjoy it. You just may need to be a little creative.
Building resilience to pressure helps you work more effectively. Stress cannot exist in an environment filled with fun, positive challenge, reward and enjoyment. So, how are you going to funatise your work?