Are We Having Fun Yet?
(Page 4 of 7)
Mar.-Apr. 2008
by Matt Labash, from the Weekly Standard
The Fun Department is a full-service shop that boasts an impressive client roster, from DuPont to AstraZeneca to QVC. Services include everything from desk-drop toy delivery (“fun on the run”) to staging Solid Gold danceoffs, paper airplane contests, silly-string wars, human bowling, and a couple dozen other funtivities. They “create consistent, quick, at-work experiences that motivate and invigorate the work environment.” They have “fun for fun’s sake while reducing tension, bolstering creativity, and building relationships.” They have business cards featuring Sparky, a smiling blue-faced logo with crazy, spinning goggle-eyes.
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Dave tells me that at AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical company, the Fun Department took over the company’s seldom-used lactation room, dressed it up as a physician’s office complete with a doctor character and a gum-cracking assistant, and wrote “prescriptions to play” while treating people for “terminal seriousness.” AstraZeneca, it turns out, has a culture of fun, which makes the Fun Department’s job easier. During their initial meeting, the head of human resources told him that they’d just recently filled a coworker’s office with packing peanuts on his birthday. “They get it,” says Dave. “They understand.”
Helping the Fun Department deliver all this levity are the Funsters, on-call hourly-wagers, mostly college students who are fit and vital and look like Abercrombie models, and who wear zany tie-dyed shock-yellow-and-orange T-shirts with Team Fun inscribed on the back. The Funsters go through Funster Boot Camp where they read the Funster training manual and learn the ins and outs of presenting fun, and also the no-no’s.
“No touching,” says Jayla. “We have to be very careful. One of the things we’ve learned is, I’ll be at an event, and some of my colleagues will be in that moment, because they’re trained to be Funsters. So there’s the CEO ripping his shirt off and swinging it over his head. And they’re like, ‘Oh my God, look at that guy!’ And here’s me [yelling] ‘HR! HR!’ ”
It’s early morning and the Funsters are preparing for a gig: getting loose, doing dance moves, engaging in lots of verbal towel-snapping. They are riding high, standing around a television set at a local gym, high-fiving each other after having to wait through all the dreary news to watch CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta do an adulatory piece on their company (publicity = fun; Minneapolis bridge collapse = not fun).
Fired up, they shove off for nearby New Castle, Delaware, where they will attend the Hospital Billing & Collection Service’s second annual “playfair.”
Housed in a nondescript brown-brick building, the company is surrounded by acre after acre of similarly anonymous-looking office parks, places with seemingly identical topiary and opaque names that betray nothing about the kind of business actually being transacted. My pulse quickens as I spy the letters TA on one nearby building, since everyone knows T&A = fun. But a subhead on the signage reveals that they are merely World Leaders in Thermal Analysis and Rheolog. (Not fun.)
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