Being Playful in the Workplace

There are loads of benefits of play in the workplace, both for organisations themselves and for the individuals themselves, just a few of which are increased psychological safety; better teambuilding; more effective communication; reduced stress and better sense of well-being; increased innovation; more creativity; better task engagement; and better job performance in general.

This online course discusses play in the workplace, trying to encourage and enable it to emerge in participants. Content will be released once a week from 3rd November onwards for 6 weeks, followed by a 7th week (15th December) where participants can share what they've done to be more playful. It will all be asynchronous, so people can consume the content (mixture of video and text) whenever they have time. It will be lovely if participants could make the final session (15th December), but it isn't compulsory, we'll encourage people to share in other ways if they can't attend that session, plus we'll record whatever happens "live" for people to see afterwards.

The expectation is that people will be paying for their own tickets and so I've tried to make it as affordable as possible! So we have £50 as the standard price (for 7 weeks of content!), slightly more expensive (£75) if your employer is paying, or if you want to attend and gift someone else a free ticket. The more £75 tickets sold, the more "pay what you can tickets" will be available for anyine who needs free or cheaper tickets.

Draft schedule (subject to change):

• Some brief theory on play / playfulness / etc 3rd November
• Some benefits of play in the workplace 10th November
• How we might try to play at work 17th November
• The threat of play (resistance we might meet to it and why) 24th November
• Psychological safety and other enabling factors 1st December
• Reflective exercises for participants / what participants could do next 8th December
• Final "sharing" session 15th December

Materials will be released each week to everyone signed up, a mix of text and video, with chance to feedback to others in the group and to influence future content as we go, so I'd plan on recording a week at a time to enable that. If anyone signs up after the start of November they will be sent all the previous weeks' contents as well as the current week. The biggest chunk of text content will be in the first week as it introduces a chunk of theory, so if anyone wants to follow up and read around play and playfulness, they can!

For the sharing session on 15th December, details will follow closer to the date, but we'll ask for people to share live (which will be recorded), or offline in a choice of formats we'll share amongst the group (and preferably publicly somehow).

The aim is for this to be sector / job role agnostic, rather than aimed at any particular profession, sector, etc., but by default it is weighted towards people that have an element of independence in their role (I've worked in factories and it would be much harder, though not impossible, for assembly line workers to take advantage of these ideas compared to universities which were my more recent employers). Also suitable for people across various countries, though it would be delivered in the English language and the final session, if anyone wishes to attend live, is UK time.

If we have too few people sign up, I reserve the option to cancel and issue refunds to everyone before the start of November.

If you like the idea of this course at your own workplace, I'll happily run a variation of it there, though it will cost more than this deliberately cheap iteration of it!