Looking to Motivate Employees in Your Workplace? Consider Adopting a Stronger Leisure Ethic

In 2005, when I sold my company to Maritz and joined the Senior Leadership Team, for the first time in years I worked for someone else. Therefore you can imagine how shocked I was when I went to check my Facebook page, as I generally do in the early mornings, only to discover that access to the site was blocked. As one of Canada’s leading marketing communication companies, I couldn’t understand why they would possibly ban access to social media in the workplace. The assumption was that people were wasting time and perpetuating unproductive habits. However Facebook is one of the finest marketing communication tools out there – and marketers should know how to use it.
Employees Lacking Motivation?
Paul Marchildon, an experienced Leisureologist, can work with you and your team to increase productivity by incorporating leisure into the workplace.Luckily for those of us who thrive on a little downtime, advocates of leisure ethics are proving this to companies time and again. Consider a scenario where a Marketing Strategist needs evidence to create a marketing plan for a new product. He or she could do what is expected to accomplish this task: drop all of their other work, spend days on the phone and in meetings, and as a last resort, buy research. Or he or she could take a risk and try a creative approach: use Twitter to gather feedback and conduct research. Most people are shocked by the quality and quantity of information they are able to gather by utilizing a Social Media tool for this purpose.
If employees use their Facebook break as a way to chat with friends or catch up on news, it’s not entirely a bad thing. A recent study found that those who do moderate “workplace internet leisure browsing” are about 9 percent more productive. Study author Brent Coker of the University of Melbourne’s Department of Management and Marketing, says, “people need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration.” This break “enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a day’s work, and as a result, increased productivity.” The idea that we should ban all forms of leisure from our workdays is as absurd as it is untenable. How are we supposed to revitalize our minds, stay on top of industry trends and news, or be company ambassadors if we have to “work” all day long?