Fish! Play

(see my previous post on the Fish! book if you don't know what I'm taking about)

One fine day in Seattle, our fictional manager takes her children to the fish market where her favourite fishmonger proceeds to illustrate his second major principle... Play. This is pretty self-explanatory really: don't be afraid to goof around a bit, enjoy yourself, don't take yourself too seriously. Make your workplace a really fun place to be, where people want to spend their time.

Playing is something we at work (the development team at least) do really well. In our area of desks we have an airzooka, which gets a lot of use, along with a variety of small balls and one great big ball that someone used to use as a chair. The principle 'if someone looks like they're having a bad day you should throw something at them' seems to be widely believed, and also seems to work pretty well. :) Especially when the 'something' in question happens to be a screaming toy monkey.

We also used to have a cricket bat and I remember one particular afternoon when a couple of the guys had a fantastic game using the walkway between the desks and a lemon. The lemon started to get rather squishy after a while but went flying out the window before we could repaint the walls with lemon juice! I am at a loss to understand how the guys manage to so confidently throw/hit objects around in an office full of computer equipment but I've never seen them hit anything other than the walls, roof and each other.

On a slightly more organised level the office is equipped with some couches around an X-Box and an old arcade game in our 'Chill Out Zone' which also gets plenty of use. It's amusing to watch a particular group of frequent X-Box players frantically signalling each other across the office that another game is about to start.

Please don't get the impression that we spend all day playing silly games and never do anything else. In fact, I've noticed that the people who play the most tend to be the ones who get a lot of work done. When you're doing something, like programming, which requires intense focus you really need to be able to break out and 'change mode' completely for a while. We have an environment where we can work hard but also enjoy ourselves, which I think is great. Not too much to work on there...