Michelle Gibbings, a leadership speaker in Melbourne, says organisations often try to motivate their employees with mandatory social hours and team-building exercises that often do more harm than good. She suggests better ways of creating workplace joy. This article was originally published by psnews.com.au
The emotional baseline people bring to work is heavier than many leaders realise.
Gallup’s global data revealed that 39 per cent of adults reported feeling worried for much of the previous day, 37 per cent felt stressed, and 26 per cent reported sadness.
That matters because employees don’t leave their emotional weight at the door. They carry it into meetings, deadlines, decisions and conversations.
So, joy at work isn’t a soft issue or a nice-to-have. It is part of how organisations build energy, trust, resilience and performance.
However, joy is often misunderstood. It is not forced optimism, pretending everything is fine when the workload is heavy, the politics are messy, or the uncertainty is real.
Joy is also deeper than fun. It is the felt experience of meaningful contribution, trusted connection, agency, fairness and positive energy.
Yet when organisations and leaders try to create joy, many default to the superficial: Zoom trivia nights, mandatory social hours or team-building events designed to manufacture connection.
The intent is usually well-meaning, but the execution often misfires.
My worst experience involved dodgem cars, when what was supposed to be light-hearted fun quickly became a contact sport, with some team members deciding the real game was seeing how hard they could ram each other. It was not my idea of a good time, though in fairness, a few others loved every second of it.
That’s precisely the problem with mandated fun. It’s designed for an imaginary average employee, someone who shares the same idea of enjoyment, the same comfort with physical contact, and the same extroverted energy to turn up and be cheerful on cue.
That person rarely exists in your actual team. For example, some people love social games; others find them draining. Some people enjoy physical activities, while others feel anxious, excluded or exposed.
Some people are energised by after-work drinks. Others have caring responsibilities, health needs, cultural preferences or simply no desire to socialise after hours.
Connection at work matters deeply, but when connection feels managed, performative or obligatory, it can signal to team members who don’t fit the prescribed mould that they don’t belong.
Consequently, instead of building trust, it can quietly erode it.
If your culture is struggling, a scheduled social activity will not fix it. It’s simply a cheerful wrapper around issues your team isn’t yet comfortable discussing.
You can tell when someone is going through the motions. You can also tell when someone is connected to what they are doing, invested in the people around them and energised by the contribution they are making.
You are more likely to experience joy when you do work you find meaningful, when you have enough agency to shape your contribution, and when you feel secure enough to be generous rather than territorial.
That is different from telling people to smile more, attend the team event or be grateful because it could be worse.
So, what should leaders focus on instead of mandated fun? The answer lies in creating the conditions where genuine joy is more likely to emerge, and there are three core elements to consider in this JOY framework:
J — Justice and Psychological Safety: Joy can’t take root in environments where people feel unsafe, excluded, dismissed or unfairly treated.
Justice matters because people pay close attention to whether decisions are fair, processes are transparent, information is shared honestly, and they are treated with respect.
Psychological safety adds the interpersonal foundation. Professor Amy Edmondson at the Harvard Business School says it is the shared belief that people can speak up, ask questions, raise concerns, admit mistakes and offer ideas without fear of humiliation or punishment.
There is very little joy in a team where people are constantly managing impressions, scanning for risk or staying silent to protect themselves.
O — Ownership, Meaning and Agency: Joy also grows when people can see the value of their work and have some agency in how they do it.
People want some say in how they work. They want to feel capable and stretched. They want to know their effort connects to something that matters.
As a leader, your role is to help each person connect individual effort to meaningful impact.
That requires more than reminding people of the organisation’s purpose. It means making the line of sight clear between the task in front of them, the client or stakeholder it serves, and the broader outcome the team is working to achieve.
It also means giving people enough ownership to shape the work, not simply comply with instructions.
When people feel trusted to contribute judgment, not just labour, work becomes a source of energy, pride and meaning, not just output.
Y — Your Energy, Modelled Intentionally: Because emotions are contagious, your energy as a leader is a cultural input.
The way you walk into a room, engage in a conversation or respond to a setback sends a signal that your team reads and responds to, usually without either of you realising it.
The question worth sitting with is not whether you are modelling something; you always are. The question is, what are you modelling?
Joy does not come from pretending work is easy. It comes from creating an environment where people can do hard things with trust, meaning and support. That environment starts with you.
Your goal is not to remove all pressure from work; that’s neither possible nor desirable, but to create the conditions where your workplace’s culture enables you and your team to do your best work.
Michelle Gibbings is a Melbourne-based workplace expert, and an award-winning author. She’s on a mission to help leaders, teams and organisations create successful workplaces — where people thrive and progress is accelerated. She can be contacted at support@michellegibbings.com. This article first appeared at https://www.changemeridian.com.au/latest-news/.