What is Fun at Work?

Shreya Gupta

 

I was perusing through the Sunday NY Times, Business section a few weeks ago and I was intrigued with the headline, “At Work, Focus on the Fun”.

(Read full article here

Reading past the headline, I once again read the statistic from a recent Gallup poll that two of three working Americans do not feel engaged at work.

Actually, I can relate to that statistic as I experienced that for a considerable period of my early work experience. And then something happened – I started my own Company with a partner, and my life and my work was never the same again.

What was it that made the difference? I think it was that I found what I did was not only challenging, but also incredibly interesting, and inevitably fun.

So what is fun at work? In my opinion, it is believing that what you do does make a difference, and that being fully engaged in the process of whatever you do does matter, and seeing the impact of your efforts, despite everything that can and does get in the way, can indeed be the difference of having fun at work.

The article makes some interesting points on how to make work fun:

  • Making friends and establishing comradery with coworkers
  • Breaking the routine
  • Shifting one’s mindset to focus on the positives of one’s jobs instead of the negatives
  • Making one’s goal the process of doing the job and completing all the necessary tasks

Most importantly, I agree with the statement in this article, “…that people feel energized when the process of doing something becomes the goal of doing it”. For me, I found this very satisfying and inevitably have made work more fun for me.

Once again, Veronica Rao was helpful in my gathering my thoughts to write this piece. And, as always, I do appreciate your comments and feedback.

Simplify the Message, and Repeat it Often

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My passion and some people might say my obsession, is to learn as much as I can about successful CEO’s and successful companies. That being said, I was quite interested in the NY Times, Corner Office interview with John Lilly. John is a successful Venture Capitalist whose job is to evaluate CEO’s whose companies his venture firm is considering investing in.

(Read full article here)

Lilly’s quest is to understand the quality of a CEO’s thought process and how he or she interacts with him. He gets this information by asking a lot of questions to test whether the CEO can “be honest and candid and still get to a productive place”. In Lilly’s eyes business is all about deciding whose team you are on, and investing in those relationships by building rapport and spending time with them.

Lilly is in a unique position. He may look at 400 companies a year and might invest in two of them. He may even meet with several CEO’s in the same day, much less several each week. He believes that the biggest lesson he has learned in his job is to “simplify the message, and repeat it often”. Perhaps that’s also the lesson to be learned for both seasoned and aspiring CEO’s!

What do you think? I’d love to hear back from you. Once again, kudos to Veronica Rao for her insights in helping me prepare this article.

It is Worth Investing in Mobile Advertising!

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Just two months ago, after receiving Advertising Age’s 2016 Mobile Marketing Fact Pack I wrote a blog commenting, “that there is no escaping that the mobile world is not only here to stay, but is overtaking every other traditional form of communication.”(Read previous article here)

So when I received Advertising Age’s 2016 Marketing Fact Pack in mid December 2016, I was not surprised to see once again that mobile advertising made up 42% of all online advertising in 2016, and that is expected to raise to 49% this year, 57% in 2018 and 61% in 2019.

If you’re a marketer of consumer products and services, you should be paying close attention to investing your marketing dollars in mobile advertising.

Another fascinating fact is that predicted spending for U.S. media and marketing in 2017 is $1,333 per person. If you’re a business owner already investing in advertising, it might be a safe assumption to increase your investment inevitably increasing your reach for your target audience.

The Fact Pack is chock full of stats well worth looking at in greater depth. (Fact Pack) One more thing that stood out to me was that Millennial households make up 44% of households not subscribing to cable/satellite TV. Once again, if you are a marketer of consumer products to young people between the ages of 18 and 34, you should seriously be considering mobile advertising in 2017 and beyond.

Last October, I also wrote marketing, advertising and sales are changing as fast as I could write and publish that blog entry. Once again, I can only repeat that if you’re a marketer and want to stay in business, you better get on board and ride with the change – it’s now!

BTW, thanks to Veronica Rao for her research and insights in preparation for this article.