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Last week, Oscar Berg wrote a great post on the impact of enterprise 2.0 on fun in the workplace. I can't agree more with Oscar's thoughts : for having worked in such environments for a couple of years I can say that bringing the whole enterprise 2.0 paradigm in the workplace (tools and behaviors) makes it funnier what makes people more engaged, happier to work hard, more motivated etc...

But the facts remain : that's not because nearly everyone car understand it very easily that they'll buy it. Any reason to that ? Culture of course (and as usual).

A few months ago I realized that a large part of the E2.0 paradigm with highly related to positive thinking. Hence the question : how to bring E2.0 into a rational-skeptic world (that is much wider than we usually think) knowing that in such a world it's nearly impossible to be credible while putting work and fun together in a sentence ?

To sell fun as a driver for E2.0 we need three things at the same time :

- decision makers with the right mindset : they are ready to invest time and money on fun because they know it will drive better business results. They won't question the ROI of fun (that's even harder to demonstrate than the ROI of E2.0). Unfortunately many of them intuitively know that fun is good for business but, most of all in these hard economic times, they won't spend any dollar on it.

- supportive managers : decision makers may say "we want to build a better place to work", it's useless if line managers don't embody and support the idea in their everyday life. They have many reasons not to buy it : they've been told for years that having fun is not working, that someone who says having fun at work does not work enough, and, most off all, fighting agains fun gives them the illusion of control.

- employees that are ready for fun in the workplace. At first sight they seem to be the first ones who should be interested in buying fun, but this is often a false assumption. "Fun in the workplace" is also about attitude and interactions, what needs a fertile ground. What I'm sure of is that no one can have fun with people that do not want to let others know more about them. For instance imagine a place where employees don't want their colleague to know anything about who they are, what they like, what they're interested in...because colleagues have nothing to do in their personal life. Is such a place an exception ? A recent research about privacy on social networks demonstrates that, for instance, French were very proactive in managing their online reputation and we more likley to use multiple profiles or restrict access to separate their personal and professional life. What does it mean in the workplace ?

I recently witnessed an attempt to make people use rich profiles within a defined group (profiles would only be visible among a defined set of people who know each other well and not to the whole company). I heard many things like "why should I say if I'm married or not, if I have kids or not, what I like to do when not at work...) and I can tell you that's not the first time I see such fears and behaviors. I'm not discussing whether such attitudes should not take place in the workplace, I'm only stating that it happens and even more than anyone can think. Making the workplace warmer is not easy when people love to dress with ice.

So...let's back to fun. If any of these three points is missing we're facing a common and paradoxical situation : both people and the organization objectively need fun, most of them assume it but few (if any) will stand up and say "I buy it". But that does not mean the battle is lost.

That's not because fun is not an argument to sell E2.0 that it should be put out of the game. I already saw fun-averse organizations adopting E2.0 and...bring some kind of fun in the workplace. How did they do ?

- they had a prototyped and routine-based approach to E2.0 that made it culture-compliant

- people started having a workflow-based use of social tools. It was not supposed to be funny but efficient...and no one would have bought any other approach.

- then fun came slowly as they discovered that these tools could bring a little bit more than productivity and, with time, they had more and more fun. The funny point is that they'll never admit having fun because they didn't do it in purpose...and if they want fun to stay they know they have to keep it secret. "Fun is about people, we don't want it to become a corporate thing so we keep it ours and shut up".

Fun and Enterprise 2.0 will always come the one with the other but we have to be careful of pushing the right one. If not, business will get neither the one nor the other.