Author : Luke Hohmann Date : March 21, 2012

Timing:

  • 1 hour

Players (5..8 recommended):

  • You and your colleagues

Ingredients:

  • Internet access

Directions:
In Job or Joy, players share their hobbies, tedious chores, and what they like or dislike about work. This enhances your understanding of the participants while uncovering ways to make work more fun. Clicking on the image to the right will take you to an “instant play” game at innovationgames.com. Here, this image will be used as the “game board,” which categorizes the four different types of activities you and your coworkers do.

  • Quadrant 1: Joy – work activities that people enjoy (ex. conferences)
  • Quadrant 2: Hobbies – activities outside of work that people enjoy (ex. reading, biking, cooking)
  • Quadrant 3: Chores – activities outside of work that people don’t enjoy (ex. cleaning)
  • Quadrant 4: Job – work activities that people don’t enjoy (ex. mundane office meetings)

You will also see two icons in the top left corner:

  • Happy face: what you like to do
  • Frown face: what you don’t like to do

To add the icons, simply drag them to the board and describe what they represent. Everyone can collaborate and edit the placement and description of each image, which can be seen in real time. The results will be organized into a spreadsheet at the end to optimize the benefits of the game.

Key Points:
When people enjoy what they are doing and become engaged through self-motivation, they can push themselves to form innovative ideas and breakthroughs. Their participation is catalyzed by the activity they are involved in and they channel their personal commitment toward achieving the goal. Play Job or Joy to discover what your colleagues like/dislike to do in order to better understand who they are and how you can all maximize your joy and productivity — both during and outside of work.

4 thoughts on “Job or Joy”

  1. I fully agree. It’s a very easy and funny game, which can help a lot to create ‘good vibes’.
    We are rather young team + during last monthes 4 new person joined our team. It was a good opportunity to know each other from the other side.
    Sometimes it is difficult to us to speak about our ‘job’ wishes (‘job’ is ‘job’). But when we started to speak about our hobbies, about our chores it became easier for us to talk about our joy in job.
    After analyzing it became more understandable why one man does one task so long and another task so quick. I hope, this analysis will help us in correct task disntribution in future.

  2. Excelent activity! I had the chance to use it in a Retrospective. Once we recolected the data about what we enjoy and don’t, I encourage the team to generate ideas to move from:

    Chores –> Hobbies
    Hobbies –> Joy
    Work –> Joy

    With each new idea, I hide the initial activity with it. Doing this we achieve the posibility to change the way the team feel about each activity.

    I hope this is useful to you!! A big hug!!

  3. Hi Emilia,
    You should be able to add an image with the html tag. However, you may need to register to do this, which you can do from the right nav bar.

    Alternatively, you can send me (don at tastycupcakes.org) the photo and I can add it.

    Thanks for your comment!

    Don

  4. Hi there,

    we’ve played this game with the team for 30min and I see some advantages:
    – we discovered that we can make a volleyball team
    – most of the people like their day to day work
    – we have more things in common that we initially thought
    – 1h after the game, people were talking to each other more than before.

    I want to add a photo of the exercise, but I don’t know how to.

    *UPDATE* Here is the photo:
    Job or Joy Exercise

Comments are closed.