TL;DR: Most workplace conversations about fun and play still collapse into discussions about perks, events, or visible enthusiasm. Acey Holmes makes a more demanding argument: play at work is the ability to make work itself more stimulating, meaningful, flexible, and human. That shifts engagement from a culture activity into a work-design problem.

A team is tired, and the signs are familiar. Engagement scores have decreased. Meetings feel heavier. People are still doing the work, but the energy around it has changed.

So the organization reaches for something visible: a social event, a team activity, an intervention meant to bring “fun” back to work.

The impulse is understandable. Leaders want to signal care, create connection, and interrupt the sense that work has become all pressure. But these moments often expose the very problem they are meant to solve. They sit around the work, while the real experience of work remains largely untouched.

Acey Holmes, founder of BoredLess and Playful Work Design Expert, draws a sharp line here. Play at work, in her view, is not about making every day fun, forcing enthusiasm, or asking adults to perform cheerfulness on top of their actual responsibilities.

“I believe adults deserve to play, especially at work,” she says. But she does not advocate for more games, perks, or culture events. Instead, she argues for a different way of looking at work itself.

For Acey, playfulness is the ability to make a situation more interesting, stimulating, or engaging without pretending it is easier than it is. That keeps playfulness connected to adult work, not apart from it. It also raises a harder question for organizations trying to improve engagement: whether people are losing energy because work lacks fun, or because the work has been designed in ways that leave too little room for autonomy, connection, meaning, and human response.

Why “Fun at Work” So Often Fails

When organizations reach for fun at work, they are usually responding to something real. Work has become heavier, flatter, or more disconnected than leaders want it to feel, and the instinct to restore energy is not wrong.

The difficulty begins when play is reduced to visible fun through activities like team Olympics, bowling nights, and holiday events designed to feel energetic enough to counterbalance the exhaustion people have accumulated during the rest of the quarter. In many cases, the intention behind these efforts is genuine. Leaders want people to feel connected. They want morale to improve. They want work to feel less sterile than it often does.

But the visible success of these events can be misleading.

“A very common way to have fun at work,” Acey says, “is team Olympics.” Then she describes what usually happens next. “Leaders say, ‘Oh, everyone loved it!’ No, they didn’t. Five really loud people adored it and let you know.”

Many organizations will recognize the pattern immediately. A handful of employees visibly embrace the activity, while others participate quietly, opt out entirely, or absorb the social cost of appearing disengaged. The event itself may look successful from the outside while producing a very different internal experience across the organization.

Acey connects this directly to a broader misunderstanding about adult play. Most workplace “fun” initiatives assume that people experience enjoyment, stimulation, and connection in similar ways. But she argues that, “Everyone experiences play and playfulness very differently.”

For some people, social spontaneity genuinely creates energy. For others, the same experience feels performative, draining, inaccessible, or simply incompatible with the realities of their lives outside work. Acey describes leaders organizing after-hours bowling events during the holiday season without taking into account that employees might simultaneously be managing childcare, caregiving responsibilities, exhaustion, invisible disabilities, travel obligations, or the basic need to recover from the workday itself.

The problem is not bowling. The problem is the assumption underneath it: that engagement can be restored through isolated experiences layered on top of unchanged work conditions and the pressures of everyday life.

“That whole concept of ‘we had one event, we checked the box and now it’s done’ is not the answer to transforming anything within your workplace when it comes to culture or relationships or morale or energy.” Acey says. “It changes literally nothing.”

And it’s not simply that many culture initiatives fail, but that they fail while creating the appearance of effort. An organization can point to events, perks, and engagement activities as evidence that it cares about employees while leaving the underlying experience of work largely untouched.

This is part of why superficial culture efforts can become frustrating for employees rather than motivating. They are often experienced less as support and more as compensation for problems no one is addressing directly. The ping pong table in the office breakroom becomes symbolic not because the table itself is offensive, but because employees understand the trade being offered. Energy is being treated as something that can be temporarily injected into the environment rather than something shaped by how work operates every day.

The issue is not whether moments of fun should exist. It is whether organizations mistake those moments for culture itself. When play remains an event, it comes and goes. When the work itself remains unchanged, so does the experience employees return to the next morning.

What Play Means When It Is Not Forced Fun

The word “play” carries its own liability at work. It can sound unserious, especially to leaders who are already under pressure to prove productivity, margin discipline, and performance outcomes. The resistance is predictable: adults have responsibilities, work has consequences, and not everything that matters can or should be made enjoyable.

Acey does not try to avoid that tension. She reframes it.

“Research psychologist Dr. René Proyer defines playfulness as the ability to reframe any situation to be interesting, stimulating, or entertaining,” she says.

Only the word “entertaining” points clearly toward what most people would call fun. The other two — “interesting” and “stimulating” — sit much closer to how adults often describe meaningful work: a problem that holds attention, a task that creates momentum, a challenge that asks something of them without draining them entirely.

That is why Acey prefers to talk about playfulness before play. Play can sound like an activity. Playfulness, in her framing, is a different way of approaching what is already there.

“Playfulness is about a way of being,” she explains. “It’s a mindset shift.”

This moves the conversation away from ping pong tables and organized games. A spreadsheet can be playful for one person if it creates focus, pattern recognition, or intellectual satisfaction. A difficult conversation can become more engaging if the people are able to approach it with curiosity rather than defensiveness. A routine task can feel different when there is room to shape how it is done, who it is done with, or why it matters.

None of this requires work to become easy. In fact, Acey is careful not to promise that.

“Our goal should never be to make every single day fun,” she says. “We would just be jumping into toxic positivity.”

Work contains pressure, ambiguity, repetition, conflict, and fatigue. Organizations lose credibility when they ask employees to reinterpret those realities as fun. The stronger move is not to deny the seriousness of work, but to ask whether the way people meet that seriousness can change.

Acey puts it plainly: “We’re not negating any of the realness or the seriousness of life and of work. We’re just changing the way we approach and respond.”

The distinction separates playful work from performative positivity. The aim is not to create a workplace where everything feels light. It is to create conditions where adults can stay engaged without having to pretend that work is always enjoyable.

This also changes the role of the employee. In a forced-fun model, people are expected to display enthusiasm toward something designed for them. In a playfulness model, people need room to find what makes work more interesting, stimulating, or meaningful for them. That makes play less visible from the outside, but more relevant to the actual experience of work.

The organization may still host events. Teams may still enjoy moments that feel openly fun. But those moments are no longer asked to do the work of culture by themselves. They become secondary to a deeper question: whether the everyday experience of work gives people enough space to engage as adults rather than perform energy and enthusiasm on command.

Why Adult Play Has to Be Designed, Not Imposed

Once play is understood as a way of engaging with work, the question becomes less about what an organization adds and more about what people are allowed to shape.

“Play is personal,” Acey says. “So it’s different for everyone.”

If play is personal, it cannot depend on one dominant version of enthusiasm. It has to leave room for different ways of finding energy, attention, and connection inside the work itself.

In addition, Acey is careful to separate workplace play from the kind of childishness the word can accidentally evoke. She rejects the idea that managers should walk into meetings and ask employees to “tap into your inner child,” not because inner-child work has no value, but because it belongs in a different context.

She is not making a narrow point about taste or professionalism.

“We are adults,” she says. “Adults are different from children. We have different responsibilities. We have different lives. We have different needs. Everything is different.”

That is why playfulness has to remain professional, contextual, and sometimes serious. Adults at work are people with obligations, histories, limits, preferences, and different relationships to visibility. When organizations confuse play with forced openness, they risk turning a potentially useful idea into another demand placed on employees.

That has consequences for how work is shaped. In a forced-fun model, employees are expected to meet the organization’s chosen expression of energy. In a playful work model, the organization has to ask where people can exercise agency without losing the seriousness or purpose of the work.

Acey names optionality as one of the defining characteristics of play. At work, that does not mean every task becomes optional or every employee chooses only what they enjoy. It means the organization looks for the parts of work where people can have some influence.

“Play needs to be optional,” she says. “The work has to get done. We know that it has to get done. Sometimes it has to get done in very certain ways. But where can we do it? When can we do it? Who do we do it with? And why do we do it? It’s about flexibility and autonomy.”

This keeps play grounded in the real constraints of work. The output may be fixed. The deadline may be real. The customer expectation may not move. But inside those constraints, there may still be choices that change the experience of work: the rhythm of the task, the environment in which it is done, the degree of collaboration, and the way the task connects back to a larger purpose.

That is where play starts to look less like a mood and more like design judgment. It does not ask leaders to make work easy. It asks them to notice where unnecessary rigidity has removed energy from work that already has to happen.

Seen this way, play does not lower the seriousness of work. It raises the standard for how carefully work is designed around adults.

The Four Conditions That Turn Play Into Work Design

Acey gives the shift a name: playful work design.

“I applied four pillars to what I call playful work design,” she says. “They are flexibility and autonomy; inclusion and accessibility; psychological safety; and mission-driven work.”

Playful work design carries a different burden than workplace fun. It moves the discussion away from isolated activities and toward the conditions that shape how people experience work every day. Playfulness, in Acey’s framing, is not something employees are expected to perform. It is something the work environment either makes possible or slowly suppresses.

• Flexibility and autonomy create room for people to influence how work happens. When every part of the work is fixed, it leaves little space for energy, judgment, or ownership. A task does not need to become optional to become more engaging. It may simply need enough room for people to shape the rhythm, setting, sequence, or collaboration around it.
• Inclusion and accessibility determine whether that room is available to more than one kind of employee. A workplace can look energetic while still being narrow in the forms of participation it rewards. If playfulness only belongs to the loudest, most socially available, most physically able, or most visibly enthusiastic people in the room, it remains exclusion disguised as culture. Adult work requires a broader idea of participation: one that can include focus, quiet contribution, intellectual challenge, relational connection, humor, experimentation, and recovery.
• Psychological safety gives people enough trust to engage without protecting themselves at every turn. Playfulness requires some freedom to try, adjust, ask, misread, rethink, or approach a task differently. Without that, people may still comply, but they are unlikely to bring the curiosity or candor that makes work feel alive. A team can be told to be creative or open, but if mistakes are punished and dissent is costly, the invitation does not reach the work.
• Mission-driven work makes effort matter beyond completion. Acey is careful not to romanticize this. She does not argue that every task must feel profound or that mission language can replace compensation, workload, or operational clarity. But she is clear that people need some relationship to the purpose of what they do.

“If we don’t care about it at all at a visceral level,” she says, “it’s just not going to work.”

The four conditions are simple enough to sound familiar, which is part of their risk. Many organizations already claim to value autonomy, inclusion, safety, and purpose. The difference appears in the daily texture of work: how much room people actually have, whose needs are treated as normal, what happens when someone speaks honestly, and whether the mission survives contact with deadlines, trade-offs, and pressure.

Acey describes organizations that do this well in disarmingly plain language. “What the ones that are doing it right do,” she says, “is treat each other like humans across the board, up and down organizational hierarchies. Everyone’s a human, and we all acknowledge that.”

Treating people as humans is easy to endorse when conditions are calm. It is harder to preserve when productivity targets rise, teams are stretched, leaders are impatient, and the organization wants more output without more energy loss. Under those conditions, playful work design becomes less about culture language and more about whether the organization has built enough humanity into the way work actually happens.

Playfulness can only become durable when the surrounding conditions support it. Otherwise, it remains dependent on mood, personality, and the occasional event. When flexibility, inclusion, psychological safety, and mission are present in the work itself, playfulness has somewhere to live after the activity ends.

Why Playfulness Becomes a Performance Question

Playfulness becomes strategically relevant when it stops being treated as an emotional benefit and starts being understood as a condition for sustained contribution.

Acey makes the connection through productivity. Not in a simplistic way, as if play automatically produces more output, but through the resources people need in order to keep doing meaningful work well: energy, attention, motivation, connection, and a sense that the work is worth engaging with.

“How do we improve our productivity?” she asks. “We want everybody to do a little bit more. Okay. How can you make me want to do more?”

Organizations often talk about productivity as if it were a capacity problem: more efficiency, more output, more discipline, better prioritization. Acey’s framing places another layer underneath. People may be capable of doing more, but willingness and energy are shaped by the conditions around the work.

“Work can’t be boring,” she says. “Because if it’s boring, I don’t want to do it. It can’t be drastically misaligned with my values, because then I’m contributing to something that I don’t agree with.”

The performance logic is not separate from the human logic. Work that is chronically dull, misaligned, rigid, or isolating consumes the very energy organizations later try to recover through engagement initiatives. A team can be staffed, skilled, and technically capable, yet still lose momentum because the conditions of work make sustained commitment harder than it needs to be.

Another layer of complexity is added because, as Acey’s points out, “People are tired. Tired is the baseline.”

Work design can either deepen depletion or help people recover enough energy to stay engaged. A culture that treats energy as an individual responsibility will keep pushing employees toward personal coping strategies while leaving the daily drains intact.

Acey resists that individualization, joking about the long list of things people are already trying to do for themselves: yoga, meditation, journaling, gratitude practices, cold plunges, saunas, kale smoothies. None of these are dismissed. But none of them can compensate for an environment that keeps consuming people.

“You can do every single one of those consistently and then get to work and your boss is toxic,” she says. “You might be better off in that position, but it’s still not going to be sustainable.”

When organizations place the burden of energy entirely on individuals, they create a fragile operating model. Performance depends on people arriving already restored, already resilient, already motivated, and already able to absorb whatever the work environment does to them. The organization then treats exhaustion as a personal deficit rather than a design consequence.

Playful work design challenges that assumption. It does not remove difficulty or promise constant enjoyment. It asks whether the work environment gives people enough stimulation, autonomy, connection, and meaning to keep contributing without being steadily depleted by avoidable friction.

Creativity gives the performance argument another edge. Acey describes play as supporting the brain’s ability to make connections, recognize patterns, retain information, and think non-linearly. She is careful to note that she is not a neuroscientist, but her point is practical: when people are engaged in ways that feel interesting and stimulating, they are not merely happier. They are more able to think.

“When we play,” she says, “we’re not only supporting, boosting, and improving our brain health, we are supporting, boosting and improving our creativity.”

Organizations need creativity when teams are solving problems, adapting to constraints, interpreting customer signals, responding to change, or finding better ways to work under pressure. A drained team may still execute, but it is less likely to notice, connect, rethink, and renew.

Playfulness is not a plea for more lightness in a serious business environment. It is a way of asking whether the business is protecting the human conditions that serious work depends on. When those conditions are absent, organizations may still get effort. What they lose is the quality of effort that comes from people who have enough energy to care, enough safety to contribute honestly, and enough connection to keep working through complexity.

How Playful Work Design Becomes Visible

If playful work design is real, it should eventually become visible in the way people behave.

Acey starts with surveys, but not as a superficial sentiment exercise. Used well, they can show whether the experience of work is changing with enough consistency to matter. “To really measure the effectiveness of playful work design,” she says, “you need surveys that look at the change in behavior over time.”

That moves measurement away from isolated satisfaction and toward patterns. Are people contributing more fully? Are they withdrawing less often? Are teams recovering more quickly after pressure? Are employees showing more presence, candor, or initiative in the work itself?

Acey names productivity first. Not as a universal metric, but as a signal each organization has to define in its own context.

“If it’s being done well and it’s working,” she says, “productivity is going to go up, period, in whatever way it gets measured for you.”

For one team, that may be faster delivery. For another, fewer errors, better customer response, less rework, stronger collaboration, or more useful ideas. The measure depends on the work. The underlying question is whether the conditions around work are making contribution easier or harder.

Absenteeism offers another signal, including the quieter forms of absence that do not show up as an empty seat.

“There’ll likely be a noted reduction in absenteeism,” she says. “That might be actual physical absence, but also the quiet quitting aspect of it.”

“Quiet quitting” manifests as withdrawal from discretionary effort, silence in meetings, minimal participation, or the disappearance of small contributions that make a team smarter than its formal structure. People may still be present, meeting requirements, and doing enough to remain within expectations, but the fuller contribution the organization cannot mandate disappears.

When the conditions of work improve, some of that contribution can return. People who had become quiet, underused, or narrowly defined by their role may begin offering more insight, more presence, or more initiative. Those moments reveal capacity that was already inside the organization but not being accessed. The question is not whether employees are willing to perform enthusiasm. It is whether the work environment allows more of their judgment, attention, creativity, and presence to become available.

This makes playful work design visible in the ordinary behavior of the business. Risks surface earlier, meetings carry more honesty and less guardedness, and teams spend less energy compensating for preventable friction. People have more room to contribute in ways that fit the work rather than only the dominant style of the room.

The measurement challenge is not that playful work design is too vague to observe. It is that many of its strongest signals are distributed across the system. They appear in participation, quality of discussion, recovery after pressure, the willingness to offer ideas, the reduction of avoidable absence, and the gradual return of energy to work that had become flat or draining.

Playful work design does not become real because people say the culture feels better once. It becomes real when behavior changes repeatedly enough for the organization to notice that work is being experienced differently.

When Fun Is No Longer Enough

In conclusion , the instinct to bring “fun” back to work usually begins in the right place. Energy has dropped, and people are present, but less available. The organization senses that the human experience of work has changed and tries to respond.

Acey argues that the response has to reach deeper than the visible surface of culture. When organizations reduce play to perks or events, they keep it outside the work: added, scheduled, hosted, and then left behind. On the other hand, playful work design changes the location of the question. Autonomy, inclusion, psychological safety, and mission become the conditions through which people regain access to energy, judgment, connection, and creativity.

Playful work design is not the opposite of seriousness. It is not a softer substitute for performance. It is not a request to make every day enjoyable or to turn professional environments into places of constant lightness. Properly understood, it belongs closer to the conditions that allow adults to keep engaging with work that is demanding, repetitive, uncertain, and consequential.

Work becomes more human when the everyday experience of contribution is designed with enough care to sustain the people doing it. The organizations that hold attention, creativity, honesty, and commitment over time are rarely the ones asking employees to perform energy most visibly. They are the ones that make work itself easier to stay connected to.

Perhaps that is the real provocation in Acey’s view of play. Not that work should become more fun, but that organizations may have been asking fun to solve what only better work design can address.

Practical Takeaways: Designing Work People Can Stay Connected To

Play is a serious work-design question, not a request for more workplace entertainment. For HR and senior teams, the test is whether engagement is being built into the daily conditions of work through energy, creativity, autonomy, inclusion, and connection, or temporarily staged around it.

1. What does “play at work” mean when it is not treated as fun or entertainment?

Play at work means designing work so adults can experience it as more interesting, stimulating, or engaging without pretending it is easy or always enjoyable. Acey Holmes (Playful Work Design Expert and Founder of BoredLess) separates playfulness from forced fun because the leadership issue is not whether people laugh more at work. If the activity sits outside the work while the work itself remains draining, the organization has added entertainment rather than changed the experience of engagement.

2. How does playfulness change the way people experience work?

Playfulness changes how people approach and respond to work that already exists. Acey Holmes (Playful Work Design Expert and Founder of BoredLess) explains it as a reframing capability: routine, difficult, or serious work can become more engaging when people have room to find stimulation, purpose, or curiosity inside it. Leaders do not need to make work childish or light. They need to reduce unnecessary rigidity that blocks energy, attention, and ownership.

3. What early signals show that a culture initiative is only adding fun around the work instead of improving the work itself?

The clearest signal is visible enthusiasm from a few people being mistaken for broad engagement. Acey Holmes (Playful Work Design Expert and Founder of BoredLess) warns that events like team Olympics or after-hours activities can look successful, when in reality, some team members opt out, participate quietly, or feel judged for not joining. When employees return to the same drained routines afterward, the initiative has not changed culture. It has created a moment, not a behavioral shift.

4. Which roles or functions are most affected when play is treated as work design rather than a perk?

HR, senior leaders, managers, and team leads are all affected because playful work design changes the conditions they are responsible for shaping. Acey Holmes (Playful Work Design Expert and Founder of BoredLess) ties the work to flexibility and autonomy, inclusion and accessibility, psychological safety, and mission-driven work. Engagement can no longer be delegated to events or perks. It becomes part of how leaders structure work, meetings, decisions, and participation.

5. What risks do leaders create when they rely on forced fun, events, or perks to address disengagement?

The risk is that leaders appear to care while leaving the real experience of work untouched. Acey Holmes (Playful Work Design Expert and Founder of BoredLess) shows how one-size-fits-all fun can exclude people with different needs, preferences, caregiving realities, energy levels, or accessibility constraints. An event may create short-term visibility, but it can also deepen cynicism when employees experience it as compensation for work conditions no one is willing to redesign.

6. What should employees and stakeholders expect from playful work design that they should not expect from culture events?

Employees should expect more room to engage with the work itself, not simply more scheduled moments around it. Acey Holmes (Playful Work Design Expert and Founder of BoredLess) argues that play must respect adult realities: work still has deadlines, outputs, constraints, and serious responsibilities. The expectation should be behavior change over time. When the approach is working, people show more presence, initiative, candor, contribution, and connection inside normal work.

7. How does playful work design change the operating model for HR and leadership teams?

It shifts HR from organizing engagement activities to shaping the daily conditions under which work happens. Acey Holmes (Playful Work Design Expert and Founder of BoredLess) names four pillars of playful work design: flexibility and autonomy, inclusion and accessibility, psychological safety, and mission-driven work. Leaders have to ask where people can influence how, when, where, with whom, and why work gets done. The work may remain mandatory, but unnecessary rigidity becomes a design problem.

8. What strategic options do leaders have when they want more energy and creativity without adding superficial culture activities?

Leaders can redesign the work experience before adding another activity. Acey Holmes (Playful Work Design Expert and Founder of BoredLess) points executives toward autonomy, stimulation, human connection, and mission alignment as the real sources of energy. That means giving teams more choice in how work gets done, widening participation beyond the loudest voices, making purpose tangible in routine tasks, and creating safer conditions for contribution. The leverage sits in the work, not around it.

9. What leadership decision separates meaningful playful work design from performative engagement efforts?

The key decision is whether leaders are willing to treat disengagement as a design consequence, not an employee attitude problem. Acey Holmes (Playful Work Design Expert and Founder of BoredLess) is clear that individual coping strategies cannot offset a toxic or draining work environment. Sustained contribution requires leaders to examine the conditions they control. Without that, culture becomes fragile because performance depends on employees arriving already restored, motivated, and ready to absorb the environment.

10. How should executives measure whether playful work design is actually working?

Measurement should focus on behavior over time, not whether people enjoyed one activity. Acey Holmes (Playful Work Design Expert and Founder of BoredLess) points to surveys, productivity, absenteeism, quiet quitting, and observable participation as useful signals of employee disengagement. Executives should look for fuller contribution, lower withdrawal, and more energy, candor, or initiative in the work itself. If those patterns do not change, the organization has not yet redesigned the conditions of work.

Closing Reflection

Playful work design raises the standard for leadership because it treats energy, creativity, and engagement as operating conditions rather than employee moods. Culture becomes durable only when it is built into how work is designed, not when it is performed through occasional activity. Executives who understand that distinction gain a sharper lens for separating visible engagement from work people can actually stay connected to.

To hear how the full conversation played out, listen to Acey’s podcast episode.

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