‘managing Services: Should We Be Having Fun?’ - Review

1. Introduction

In order to have a well understanding in term of advantages and disadvantages of such ‘fun’ workplace, this essay will examine the article: ‘Managing Services: Should We Be having Fun?’ by Tom Redman and Brian P. Mathews, which was published in 2004. Tom Redman is a professor of Durham Business School, who specializes in researching quality, productivity and human resources with over 10 years of experience. He is the author of two books and has published 34 academic article in the field of human resources and behaviors. Besides that, the chosen paper was cited by 36 articles (Google Scholar) and is related to various other academic papers in examining the importance of fun in working environment. Thus, it is believed that this academic paper is reliable and can be used as an academic source for study the theme of having a fun working environment and its effects on labor performance.

1.   Identification of key themes and paper rationale

The paper is drafted based on the author’s viewpoint of the ‘fun’ working environment. There are several concepts that were introduced by the authors in the paper.

First, the paper aims to identify the benefits that ‘fun’ working environment has brought about to organization. The paper claims that according to Stewart (2996) and Matthes (1993), having ‘fun’ working place has been the focus of literature due to the many advantages it bring to workplace such  as raising work rate and work enjoyment, enhancing creativity, absenteeism reduction and stress removal, enhancing interpersonal skill, group union, entrust in staff and advancing organizational learning. There is a growing interest in the view that when employees have fun there are distinct individual and organizational benefits to be gained, especially in the more popular management literature, a great deal of literature has claimed for the benefits of fun environment. Second, after detailing the benefits attributed to fun, the paper examine the wider literature on the subject to explore the ‘how’ and ‘why’ issues to illuminate a variety of the aspects of fun in practice and attempt to identify the underlying managerial philosophy. Third, the article is devoted to an in-depth case analysis of a UK service organization that adopted fun as part of its overall business strategy. The case was analyzed through two approach of firms: Fun environment and Just-Do-It concept for staffs. It is clear from the case that fun and empowerment are complementary.

This paper highlights the demand for entrusted staff in order to create a fun working culture. However, it is uneasy to adapt a fun working environment as the process for adapting such culture is complicated. Moreover, there are downsides of grasping such fun culture. For example, not every single employee would prefer joking in workplace. The result demonstrated that a compelling minority of front line employees have difficulty in coping with the new organizational culture. The concern of managing culture is the objective to follow the firm’s value, which is serving excellent customer services (Ogbonna and Wilkinson, 1988; Ogbonna and Whipp, 1999). Thus, any upcoming management process and actions are forecasted to advocate such objective. Thus, the only revolution in culture is how ‘fun’ directors and managers establish in achieving the desired fun culture. The revolution started by a top-down approach, so that managers would have to exhibit the fun philosophy are performed by themselves. This would then lead to the application of fun philosophy in other staffs in the front line as well.  There are several ways to have fun at work, such as wearing fancy dress, singing with customers and hosting funny events. An example is managers being held in sets of stocks so that both staff and customers are able to throw wet sponges at.

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