Fun Works: Creating Places Where People Love to Work, 2nd Edition

From the coauthor of the bestselling book on fun in the workplace, 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work

Leading-edge organizations have discovered that fun can--and does--translate into bottom line success. By harnessing the power of fun, companies find they can better retain employees and customers, motivate teams, improve productivity, increase innovation, and create a sense of community.

Leslie Yerkes details precisely how eleven successful companies--including Southwest Airlines, Pike Place Fish, Isle of Capri Casinos, EmployEase, and Prudential--have integrated fun into the normal course of business. This new edition provides updates on how these same companies have grown, prospered, and continued to thrive--in spite of national tragedies, natural disaster, growing competition, and changing economic conditions--in part because of the culture they have created through what Yerkes calls "The Fun/Work Fusion."

Yerkes illustrates eleven principles--from capitalizing on the spontaneous to hiring good people and getting out of their way--that will inspire you to inject a sense of playfulness and joy into your workplace. Full of real-life examples, strategies, ideas, resources, tools, tips, and techniques, Fun Works will help any company in any industry become a place where people love to work.

1. Proves that organizations can use fun to increase employee and customer retention, motivate individuals and teams, and improve overall productivity
2. Completely revised and updated to show how the companies profiled in the first edition have continued to thrive by combining fun and work
3. From the coauthor of the bestselling book on fun in the workplace, 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work (75,000 copies sold)

About The Author:

Leslie Yerkes has been advancing the cause of positive organizational culture for over twenty-five years, ever since she started The Catalyst Consulting Group with a mission to do consulting with a conscience. Her interests are many but her vision for a workplace emboldened by empowered, enthusiastic employees and managers is singular.

Author of five books, including three for Berrett-Koehler, Leslie tends to run with her enthusiasms only after testing their viability in the rubber-meets-the-road environments of the organizations she consults with, be they small passionate non-profits or global Fortune 50 conglomerates. She nailed ‘fun at work' with co-author Dave Helmsath way back in 1997, and revisited the concept with the essential Fun Works, Creating Places Where People Love to Work, in 2001.

In re-doing the book for a second edition, a lot of her experience and learning fueled a renewal of her enthusiasm. All of a sudden the idea of fun at work was not nearly as magnetic for her as was the conception of a soft science of organizational change, a conception for which fun and fulfillment were ingredients in a much more robust mix.

This mix was geared to provide a recipe for a richly complex, sophisticated and deeply human view about how to optimally support business success by supporting the success of the people that are the human core of the organization.

They Just Don't Get It: Changing Resistance Into Understanding, is of a piece with this too. The book addresses how communication can be undermined, while it provides practical techniques to explore and solve communication problems. There's little that can be changed in an organization unless stakeholders listen closely, and support their own and each other's openness, and, are passionate about daring to do things—together-- differently.

As a consultant, author, thought leader, and keynote speaker, Leslie is all about deep change and other kinds of daring.