Stop Confusing Serious Work With Joyless Work

Joy, play, gratitude, and rigour are not competing ideas. Good leadership knows how to hold them together

Written by: Adelee Penner

Abstract

Somewhere along the way, many workplaces learned to perform seriousness.

Important work should look serious. High standards should feel demanding. Rigour should be visible. Meetings should be efficient. Professionalism should be restrained.

And fun?

Fun is what happens after the work is finished.

Recent research gives us reason to question that assumption.

Studies of learning show meaningful relationships between positive emotions, motivation, and performance. Emerging research on playful work design suggests that people can make demanding work more engaging by deliberately introducing elements of fun, imagination, competition, and challenge. Research on workplace gratitude points toward relationships with motivation, performance, connection, and well-being.

But there is an equally important warning.

Leaders cannot manufacture joy. Forced fun can backfire. Competition can become overinvestment. Gratitude can become performative. And positivity becomes harmful when it denies legitimate frustration, concern, grief, anger, or difficulty.

The leadership question is therefore not:

How do we make everyone happier at work?

It is:

What conditions allow people to do serious, demanding work with curiosity, connection, gratitude, playfulness, and joy—and what do we lose when those conditions disappear?

Somewhere along the way, many workplaces learned to perform seriousness.

If the work matters, the room should look serious.

If the standards are high, people should feel pressure.

If the meeting is important, the agenda should be full.

If someone is laughing, experimenting, building something, playing with an idea, or enjoying themselves a little too much, somebody eventually wonders whether enough work is getting done.

I understand where this comes from.

There is serious work in the world.

There are consequential decisions.

Deadlines matter.

Standards matter.

Expertise matters.

People depend on us getting things right.

Rigour matters.

But I have begun to wonder when we decided that rigour needed to feel grim.

Because those are not the same thing.

And increasingly, the research gives us reason to separate them.

Joyful Learning Is Not Easy Learning

Let me begin with learning, because I think it helps us understand the workplace differently.

A 2025 meta-analysis by Xie and colleagues synthesized 120 studies conducted between 2000 and 2024 examining relationships among academic emotions, performance, and motivation.

Positive academic emotions were positively associated with performance and, even more strongly, with motivation. Negative emotions showed relationships in the opposite direction.

That does not mean learning should always feel good.

Anyone who has learned something genuinely difficult knows better.

Learning can involve confusion.

Frustration.

Uncertainty.

Failure.

Reconsideration.

Effort.

The research does not tell us to eliminate those experiences.

It tells us that emotion is part of learning, not something happening outside it.

And that matters because we often seem to assume that the more serious the learning becomes, the less room there should be for joy.

I think we have that backwards.

Joyful learning is not learning without challenge.

It is learning in which challenge can coexist with curiosity, interest, possibility, connection, discovery, and the satisfaction of finally understanding something that was difficult.

That is not less rigorous.

It may be what helps people stay with the rigour.

Rigour Is Not Misery

This distinction matters to me.

If rigour means careful thinking, intellectual challenge, precision, disciplined inquiry, meaningful feedback, persistence, and high standards, I want more of it.

If rigour means making work unnecessarily unpleasant so that everyone understands we are taking it seriously, I am less convinced.

Difficulty and rigour are not synonyms.

Neither are pressure and excellence.

A task can be difficult because the instructions are poor.

A meeting can be exhausting because nobody has decided what it is for.

An organization can demand extraordinary effort because its systems are inefficient.

None of those things makes the work rigorous.

They simply make it harder.

Perhaps this is where play becomes interesting.

RESEARCH DEEP DIVE

Can We Have Fun at Work and Still Be Competent?

That is almost exactly the question Pap, Tisu, and Vîrgă asked in recent workplace research.

Their study followed 209 employees from diverse occupations over 12 consecutive working days.

They examined a concept called playful work design: the ways people intentionally bring playfulness and challenge into ordinary work.

The findings are particularly useful because they are more nuanced than “fun workplaces are better.”

A playful organizational climate did not simply produce engagement on its own.

People had to actually enact playfulness in their work.

And on days when employees incorporated more playfulness and challenge into their tasks, they reported greater feelings of competence and greater work engagement.

That matters.

The workplace did not become productive because someone announced:

“We are a fun organization!”

The climate created permission.

Employees turned that permission into behaviour.

And the behaviour was associated with competence and engagement.

That is a very different leadership proposition.

Serious Play

Workplace research generally calls this playful work design, but I keep thinking of it as serious play.

The phrase sounds contradictory.

I don't think it is.

Playful work design includes two broad forms.

One is designing fun: bringing imagination, humour, creativity, surprise, or enjoyment into work.

The other is designing competition or challenge: creating small goals, stretching oneself, turning a task into something to solve, or finding satisfaction in improving performance.

In other words, play is not necessarily an escape from demanding work.

Sometimes, play creates the challenge.

And that is where the idea of serious fun becomes useful.

Imagine someone turning a repetitive task into a personal challenge.

A team sketching ridiculous possibilities before deciding which ones deserve serious consideration.

A group using physical objects to model a complex system.

Colleagues laughing while wrestling with an extraordinarily difficult problem.

A leader asking, “What would we try if we knew the first answer did not have to be right?”

None of those activities necessarily reduces the intellectual demand.

Sometimes they open the door to it.

There Is Now Good Evidence That the Balance Matters

A 2026 systematic review by Firoz, Ghosh, and Sharma synthesized 35 peer-reviewed studies of play at work.

Their conclusion was not that more play is always better.

Play was highly context-dependent.

When authentically integrated into work, it was associated in the literature with outcomes such as well-being, innovation, collaboration, creativity, and engagement.

When it was coercively imposed, however, it could generate cynicism and undermine trust.

And new research makes the paradox even more interesting.

Costantini and colleagues examined the “bright and dark side” of playful work design using two substantial samples: a cross-sectional study involving 1,262 participants and a daily diary study involving 742 employees across 2,774 workdays.

Both designing fun and designing competition were associated with greater engagement.

But they did not produce identical consequences.

Designing fun was associated with less workaholism.

Designing competition was associated with more workaholism.

The researchers found particularly strong engagement when fun and challenge were both high, while a relative surplus of fun appeared protective against excessive work investment.

I find that fascinating.

The answer is not:

Make work easier.

Nor is it:

Make everything a competition.

The answer seems closer to:

Create a challenge without removing humanity from the challenge.

That sounds like rigour to me.

Gratitude Belongs in This Conversation Too

Gratitude can sound soft when placed beside words like performance, accountability, standards, and results.

The research suggests we should be more careful about dismissing it.

A 2025 two-wave longitudinal study involving 246 employees found that gratitude was positively related to task performance both cross-sectionally and over time. Gratitude was also prospectively related to lower amotivation and higher forms of work motivation, including intrinsic motivation.

The authors are appropriately cautious: more research is needed, especially with objective performance measures and stronger causal designs.

We should be cautious too.

An earlier systematic review of gratitude interventions among workers reached a similarly measured conclusion. Some studies found improvements in outcomes, including perceived stress and depression, but results for broader well-being were inconsistent, study heterogeneity was high, and all nine included studies were judged at high overall risk of bias.

That does not make gratitude unimportant.

It makes our use of it more sophisticated.

Gratitude is not magic.

It is not an employee-retention strategy disguised as a thank-you card.

And it should never become:

You should be grateful you have a job.

That is not gratitude.

That is power asking for compliance.

The gratitude I am interested in is relational.

I noticed what you did.

It mattered.

You helped.

You made this better.

I learned something from you.

Thank you.

Those words tell people that their contribution has been seen.

That matters in human systems.

Leaders Cannot Mandate Joy

This may be the most important leadership caution in the entire conversation.

You cannot put joy on the agenda and assume you have created it.

Research on workplace fun has demonstrated this for some time.

Tews, Jolly, and Stafford studied 491 employees across 141 retail locations and paired employee survey data with turnover six months later.

Fun activities were associated with lower turnover only when employees experienced the fun as less managed.

When fun felt more managed or contrived, those benefits disappeared. Coworker socializing was even associated with higher turnover under more highly managed conditions.

That gives leaders an important warning:

Mandatory fun is still mandatory.

Pizza does not repair distrust.

A team-building game does not compensate for chronic overwork.

A gratitude wall does not repair inequity.

A retreat does not substitute for listening.

An organization cannot call itself joyful while making it dangerous to say that something is wrong.

Gratitude Is Not Toxic Positivity

This distinction has become even more important.

New 2026 research by Grosvenor and Loi examined toxic positivity among 301 Australian employees.

Toxic positivity—pressure to maintain or display positivity while negative experiences are dismissed—was positively associated with shame, emotional exhaustion, and intentions to withdraw from work. Their analysis suggested a pathway in which toxic positivity related to shame, which related to emotional exhaustion, which in turn related to withdrawal intentions.

The authors are clear that this remains an emerging area requiring more research.

But the signal deserves attention.

A joyful workplace is not a workplace where everybody must be happy.

It is a workplace where joy is possible and truth remains welcome.

People can be grateful and frustrated.

Hopeful and tired.

Proud and disappointed.

Committed and concerned.

A leader can celebrate what is working while still asking what is not.

Those are not contradictions.

They are emotionally honest workplaces.

Perhaps Joy Is an Organizational Resource

This is where the argument becomes bigger for me.

What happens when a workplace gradually removes the conditions for joy?

Not through one dramatic decision.

Through accumulation.

Every meeting becomes transactional.

Every learning experience becomes compliance.

Every project becomes urgent.

Every mistake becomes evidence of incompetence.

Every minute must be visibly productive.

Every achievement is immediately followed by the next target.

Every serious issue must be discussed in serious voices.

Eventually, people learn something.

They learn what belongs at work.

Curiosity gets quieter.

Humour gets safer.

Experimentation gets more cautious.

Gratitude gets assumed.

People still perform.

But something in the organization becomes thinner.

That is the leadership hazard I am concerned about.

Not that people will stop having fun.

That would be a too-small argument.

The risk is that we gradually remove some of the emotional and relational conditions through which people learn, connect, experiment, recover, imagine, and sustain difficult work.

TRY THIS IN PRACTICE

Audit the Emotional Architecture of the Work

Choose one recurring meeting, project, professional learning experience, or team routine.

Do not ask whether it is “fun.”

Ask instead:

• Where is the challenge? Are people being asked to think, stretch, solve, question, and improve?

• Where is the curiosity? Is there room to wonder, explore, experiment, or be surprised?

• Where is the humanity? Can people laugh, connect, tell stories, admit uncertainty, and be themselves?

• Where is the gratitude? Do people know when their contribution has mattered?

• Where is the truth? Can someone say, “This isn't working,” without being treated as negative?

• Where is the choice? Is play invited, or is participation in “fun” another performance requirement?

That gives us a very different way to think about workplace culture.

Not:

Are people happy enough?

But:

Have we designed conditions in which demanding work can remain deeply human?

Leadership Should Create Permission, Not Performance

Recent research on empowering leadership makes this particularly interesting.

Peral and Weitz found that empowering leadership was indirectly associated with work engagement through playful work design. When leaders provided greater autonomy and decision-making authority, employees were more likely to incorporate fun and challenge into their own work, which was associated with greater engagement.

Notice the sequence.

The leader did not provide the fun.

The leader provided agency.

People did something with it.

I think there is an important principle here:

Leaders create permission. People create play.

Leaders can protect autonomy.

Allow experimentation.

Use humour without using it to dismiss concerns.

Celebrate learning.

Recognize contribution.

Make space for curiosity.

Protect recovery.

Invite challenge.

Notice small wins.

Allow people to enjoy being very good at something difficult.

And perhaps most importantly, leaders can model the idea that serious professionals do not need to prove their seriousness by removing joy from the room.

Serious Fun May Be Exactly What Serious Work Needs

I am not arguing for frivolous workplaces.

I am arguing against unnecessarily joyless ones.

There is work that requires enormous concentration.

There are moments when humour is inappropriate.

There are crises that require urgency.

There are standards that should not be negotiated.

There are mistakes with serious consequences.

There are days when nobody feels joyful.

That is real work.

But real work also includes discovery.

Mastery.

Connection.

Curiosity.

Pride.

Humour.

Gratitude.

Challenge.

Wonder.

And the extraordinary satisfaction of solving something difficult alongside people we respect.

Perhaps we need to stop treating those experiences as extras.

They may be part of how human beings sustain serious work.

Rigour Is Not Grimness

Joy is not the absence of rigour. It may be one of the conditions that helps people sustain it.

Serious work can include serious fun.

Gratitude that cannot coexist with truth is not gratitude. It is performance.

Leaders do not create joy by scheduling it. They create conditions in which it is allowed to emerge.## A Final Provocation

What if joy is not the opposite of rigour?

What if it is one of the conditions that helps people sustain it?

And perhaps the greater leadership risk is not that people will have too much fun at work.

Perhaps it is that, in our effort to look serious, efficient, productive, and professional, we create workplaces where people slowly forget why the work was worth caring about in the first place.

Reflective Questions

Where has your organization unintentionally equated seriousness with professionalism?

Where does joy emerge naturally in your workplace? What conditions seem to make it possible?

Do people have opportunities to play with ideas before being expected to perfect them?

Where has challenge become productive—and where has it simply become pressure?

How is gratitude expressed? Is it specific and relational, or mostly ceremonial?

Can people openly name disappointment, frustration, concern, or fatigue without being labelled negative?

Are workplace “fun” activities genuinely voluntary?

What would it look like to protect rigour while making more room for curiosity, humour, connection, play, and gratitude?

And perhaps the question worth carrying forward:

Have we made our work more serious than it needs to feel?

Let's talk again soon. Take good care of yourself.

Adelee

References

Costantini, A., Scharp, Y. S., Avanzi, L., van Iperen, L. P., & Vignoli, M. (2026). The bright and dark side of playful work design: Navigating work engagement and workaholism. Journal of Business and Psychology, 41, 809–828.DOI 10.1007/s10869-025-10091-y

Firoz, M., Ghosh, K., & Sharma, D. (2026). From games to gains: A systematic literature review on play at work. Management and Labour Studies, 51 (1), 89–115.DOI 10.1177/0258042X251399238

Grosvenor, S. L., & Loi, N. M. (2026). Exploring toxic positivity, shame, emotional exhaustion, and job withdrawal intentions in the workplace. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. Advance online publication.DOI 10.1111/sjop.70123

Komase, Y., Watanabe, K., Hori, D., Nozawa, K., Hidaka, Y., Iida, M., Imamura, K., & Kawakami, N. (2021). Effects of gratitude intervention on mental health and well-being among workers: A systematic review. Journal of Occupational Health, 63 (1), e12290.DOI 10.1002/1348-9585.12290

Nicuță, E.-G., Opariuc-Dan, C., Diaconu-Gherasim, L. R., & Constantin, T. (2025). Linking trait gratitude to employees' performance and work motivation: A two-wave longitudinal study. Personality and Individual Differences, 246, 113310.DOI 10.1016/j.paid.2025.113310

Pap, Z., Tisu, L., & Vîrgă, D. (2026). Can we have fun at work and still be competent and engaged? Multilevel pathways from playful climate to work engagement. Journal of Business and Psychology, 41, 571–585.DOI 10.1007/s10869-025-10017-8

Peral, S. L., & Weitz, A. (2025). Empowering leadership, playful work design, and work engagement. South African Journal of Psychology, 55 (3), 447–458.DOI 10.1177/00812463251365493

Tews, M. J., Jolly, P. M., & Stafford, K. (2021). Fun in the workplace and employee turnover: Is less managed fun better? Employee Relations: The International Journal, 43 (5), 979–995.DOI 10.1108/ER-02-2020-0059

Xie, J., Cho, K. W., Wei, T., Xu, J., & Fan, M. (2025). The effects of academic emotions on learning outcomes: A three-level meta-analysis of research conducted between 2000 and 2024. Learning and Motivation, 90, 102109.DOI 10.1016/j.lmot.2025.102109