At the conference, the American woman in the audience was emphatic. Her ABC Corporation, a software multinational, had built a miniature golf course over a whole floor of each of its national headquarters in the European Union. Green carpet, holes, flags, the lot.
And in two years’ time ABC, thrown on to the defensive by today’s worldwide shortage of quality programmers, would strip out the fairways and in their place install, say, American football pitches. Providing play was the only way ABC could hope to attract, motivate and retain people.
How has this happened? Well, management consultant McKinsey’s famous dogma of 1998, that employers were in a ‘war for talent’, now commands mass audiences. Recruitment agencies insist that, in full-employment Britain, employees can now bully bosses into family-friendly working hours, job satisfaction and a groovy life.
But if you believe any of that, you’re just as likely to believe that the work place should be play-pen.
The concept that ‘work is play’ still has a long way to run in the European Union. But already the vocabulary of business is suffused with bogus metaphors. Facilities managers themselves draw up game plans, get on the fast track to win-win situations, stay in the right ball park and play hard ball, touch base with everyone and, of course, are definitely team players. Everyone has been to corporate away-days and, even without recourse to paint guns or quizzes, experienced the peremptory injunction ‘you will have fun’.
Among the psychic rewards that facilities are nowsupposed to provide for all-powerful employees, play stands out as the one most likely to be therapeutic.
That is because the mental and physical states summoned when people play are a deep part of what it is to be human. Play involves fun and sometimes mirth, but can be deeply serious, tense and absorbing. Play builds certain forms of social cohesion around rules, order, and the finite boundaries of time and space.
The doctrine that facilities should be ‘edutaining’ can distract from the business of creating genuine value
Sometimes, play is about myth and ritual; often, it is about the re-assembly of existing elements in a more aesthetic manner.
Now nobody can deny that people work better when they’re having fun. But the doctrine that facilities should be decorative, leisurely, entertaining or even ‘edutaining’ can distract from the business of creating genuine value. Why? Because play is about consumption, not production. Play is not about finding truth and acquiring wisdom; it is about chance, illusion, fantasy, magic. In play one displays to win admiration; one must also hold one’s head high after a defeat, to show character.
These are the imperatives of play, not business. Unlike business too, play is somehow separate from the outside world. Unlike work, play is about an uninterrupted flow of feelings, symbols and images that are basically irrational. We are rational enough to know this, but we recognise when strict rationality can be suspended, in play, and we enjoy the sensation.
Facilities managers do themselves no favours, then, if they kowtow to management fads and obey the instruction from human resources to turn the office into a sandpit. A sandpit may get higher commitment and productivity from employees for a time; but eventually the grit they pick up between their toes will slow them down. The rule-based quality of discipline in play has nothing in common, after all, with the duress of the workplace – for play is a voluntary activity, freely entered into.
The most sinister aspect of the new ideology of play, however, is not that it falsely raises expectations now, only to dash them later. Rather, what is worrying about the apostles of play at work is their unstated assumption that adult employees should be treated as, and should behave like, primary-school children. This is the approach of Peter Mandelson and the Millennium Dome; the result, in Greenwich, is the opposite of genuine innovation.
For the Department of Trade and Industry, the way forward for UK plc is to build the knowledge economy and uphold the creative re-arrangement of electrons that goes by the name of e-commerce. For some architects and interior designers, a kids’ party atmosphere in office décor displays maturity and effortless wealth creation on the part of the client. In their ideal world, these two factions differ little from the philosopher Plato, for whom man was God’s plaything, and life had to be lived as play to appease the deities.
Source
The Facilities Business
