The Power of Play at Work

We are living in the age of workplace metrics.

There are dashboards for productivity, performance, engagement, utilization, goals, retention, OKRs, KPIs - and that is just scraping the surface.

And to be clear: I like data.

I’ve used eNPS, engagement surveys, performance data, completion rates, and many other metrics throughout my career. Good data helps us spot problems, measure whether something is working and make better decisions. But, somewhere between measuring performance and optimizing it, I think we risk forgetting something important:

Humans at work are still human.

An employee can have fantastic metrics and be miserable, spreading discontent to coworkers. I’ve seen it.  Someone can be hitting every target, getting excellent performance ratings and looks like the ideal employee from every dashboard while quietly burning out. 

That’s the limitation of metrics. They can tell us a lot about what’s happening, but they can’t always tell us about the experience of working there. And eventually, that matters.

Productivity isn’t the same thing as a healthy workplace.

Organizations understandably want productive employees. But, maximizing every available metric doesn’t necessarily maximize the organization. People aren’t machines where the goal is simply to extract the greatest possible amount of output from every available hour.

People need relationships. Humor. Autonomy. Support. Recovery. Connection, Curiosity. Occasionally, they need to spend ten minutes debating something completely irrelevant with their coworkers.

Sometimes you have to make space for humans to human.

Interestingly, workplace research increasingly suggests that providing space for humans to human is not at odds with strong performance. 

A 2025 meta-analysis covering 22 studies and more than 6,600 participants found that workplace fun had meaningful positive relationship with workplace engagement. It also found a smaller, negative relationship between workplace fun and emotional exhaustion - a core dimension of burnout. The relationship isn’t proof that adding trivia to the calendar will magically create engaged employees, but it challenges the idea that fun and productive work sit on opposite sides of the equation. (1)

A 2026 review of workplace play similarly describes playfulness as having the potential to support creativity, motivation, and well-being. And recent organizational research has explored play as something more consequential than entertainment: a social resource that can support authentic connection, psychological safety, and inclusion. (2, 3)

Turns out, letting people be people may actually be good for business. 

I’m not talking about mandatory fun. Let’s establish that immediately. Nobody wants to receive a calendar invite titled: Mandatory Team Fun 🎉.. That’s not play, that;s a meeting wearing a party hat. 

A 2026 systematic review of 35 studies found that workplace play can support well-being, innovation and collaboration when it’s authentically integrated into the workplace. But when the coercively imposed, it can create cynicism and undermine trust instead.

Hopefully, that makes intuitive sense. You can’t require people to have fun, forced commodore takes the fun out of the interaction. You also can’t use fun as a substitute for addressing genuine workplace concerns that are making people unhappy. 

Real play is voluntary, low-pressure and doesn’t require employees to perform enthusiasm for leadership

It can look like a competition, a silly Slack thread, a show-and-tell, trivia, a challenge, etc. The activity matters less than what it creates.

Play lets people interact without an agenda. Think about how many workplace interactions are transactional:

I need this.

What’s the status?

Can you review this?

Here’s the deadline.

Are we aligned?

Can everyone see my screen?

Those interactions are necessary, but they reveal a very narrow version of the people we’re working with. 

Play creates space where the immediate objective isn’t producing something. And that’s often when we learn about one another.

• Someone is absurdly competitive about trivia

• Someone knows everything about obscure movies

• Someone paints

• Someone is a plant whisperer

• Someone else is enthusiastic about plants but accidentally kills them all

• Someone else can solve a puzzle in under 10 seconds

Those interactions may look unproductive on a dashboard if the only thing we’re measuring is output.

Human relationships don’t fit particularly well into a productivity dashboard. Research on organizational play increasingly points to its relational value. Recent work has connected play with authentic connection and psychological safety, while broader reviews have found links with collaboration, innovation, and well-being.

Those things matter when people need to ask for help, challenge an idea, solve a problem, collaborate cross-functionally, or admit they don’t know something. Building a workplace where people can do great work doesn’t mean optimizing every minute of their day. Sometimes it means creating more room for connection, humor, and a little play.

I help organizations look beyond the metrics to understand what their people need to stay connected, engaged, and doing their best work.

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Sources

1. Tzioti, E., Montgomery, A., Spiliou, M., Mouratidis, C., Chalili, V., Maliousis, I., & Lainidi, O. (2025). Fun at work, job engagement, and burnout: a meta-analysis and narrative synthesis. Cogent Psychology, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311908.2025.2492453

2. René T. Proyer, Rebekka Sendatzki. 2026. Examining Play and Playfulness at Work: Current Knowledge, Practical Applications, and Future Research Directions. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 13:251-276. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-020924-064249

3. Restubog, S. L. D., K. Kiazad, K. Aquino, L. Wang, and G. Yeo. 2026. “ The Power of Play in Organizations.” Journal of Organizational Behavior 47, no. 4: 521–526. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.70074.

4. Firoz, M., Ghosh, K., & Sharma, D. (2026). From Games to Gains: A Systematic Literature Review on Play at Work. Management and Labour Studies, 51(1), 89-115. https://doi.org/10.1177/0258042X251399238