“Have fun at work”! How?

Photo by Park Troopers on Unsplash

 

Dear Readers,

Thank you for coming here!

During my previous journey as a consultant, I was repeatedly told to have fun at work.

I always thought that was just Partners talking, who were far away from the operational challenges and the resulting emotional and physical drain.

How to have fun when you are working 16–20 hours a day and you still see a huge pile of “To-dos”? 

But I did get a flavor recently.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

We were doing a project. Part of the requirement was to estimate presence of a particular type of equipment in South East Asia, including Singapore.

We were collecting information from all sorts of sources: paid reports, experts, analysis etc etc

After a week of work, we got a rough idea.

During the weekend, I was taking my family to a park in a cab. 

On the way, I saw a site with a “very similar” type of equipment installed. The logo displaced was also a major manufacturer and installer of the equipment from our research.

I immediately took a picture and sent to the team chat, getting the team to have a quick investigation coming Monday.

And it turned out to be a minor category of application of the equipment that the experts had been ignoring.

While it is almost impossible to pin point the number of such sites, having it in the estimation would make the analysis more complete and credible.

Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash

I would probably have ignored the site if I was not trying to “have fun”.

All I thought of would be how much work to do coming Monday.

For the site, it could be just something similar, since the expert did not even mention it. 

And the analysis right now seemed ok anyway.

…

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

It is really critical to have people who could “have fun” during stressful projects.

Unfortunately, those roles are typically played by Partners.

To the team, they may be just talking and getting the team to do more work.

But at the end of the day, they ultimately own the deliverables and would feel the thunder when things go south (They can of course pass down a bit).

So they are under pressure as well. Probably they are used to it or just able to not show it in front of the team.

So if we want to be somewhere, we better start acting like we are there already.

To us all!