‘Employees who play are employees who stay’
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One expert spoke about how HR leaders can use play as a sustainable method to practise and get better at skills such as AI while fostering psychological safety.
Innovation, creativity, vulnerability, and resilience are the pillars of play – a growing essential in the workforce. “We need to think about play more as a mindset and a mode. There is a kind of execution and the doing of it versus being a state of mind for us to approach things,” said Dara Simkin (pictured), founder of Culture Hero, on a recent episode of The HR Leader Podcast.
“We didn’t learn to walk by reading about balance. We didn’t learn to talk by exploring grammar. We just babbled and fell and learned and did dumb things. And that’s what we have to do with AI. We just have to play with it. We don’t have to fear technology. We can play with it.”
“It’s really about how we approach our work from a state of curiosity, from a state of openness, from a state of collaboration.”
She said that when workplaces reclaim play by training for the unexpected, they create low-stakes opportunities for growth, fostering psychological safety in the workplace.
Simkin said that in a high-stakes environment, when playfulness, creativity, and dynamic thinking cannot be accessed, these are the skills that are most needed.
“So how are we creating these kinds of moments of low stakes where people can start to build their sense of competence, confidence, and consciousness [in a] way [that] when stakes are high, they have something they can fall back on,” she said.
“Employees who play are employees who stay …. from a multi-generational perspective, play is a total leveller … So no matter how old you are, if you permit your people to play and you create a safe enough space for them, they’re going to do it right.”
In addition, Simkin stressed the importance of rituals, such as a small session with the team, about what can elevate the team, and what the gaps are, for example, what is a small repeatable habit that can be created as a team to bring them closer together.
She said employees should separate their identities from their achievements. “It gets kind of bastardised in a way where we then feel like our identity is on the line, and if we don’t perform at a high level, that we aren’t going to have our job tomorrow,” she added.
“That idea of work and life being separate, I think, has sort of been debunked. And we realise that it takes more energy to be someone else at work than when we actually are ourselves.”
RELATED TERMS
An employee is a person who has signed a contract with a company to provide services in exchange for pay or benefits. Employees vary from other employees like contractors in that their employer has the legal authority to set their working conditions, hours, and working practises.
Carlos Tse
Carlos Tse is a graduate journalist writing for Accountants Daily, HR Leader, Lawyers Weekly.
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