Fun Works: Creating Places Where People Love to Work

Leading-edge organizations have discovered that fun can--and does--translate into bottom line success. By harnessing the power of fun, companies find they can better retain employees and customers, motivate teams, improve productivity, increase innovation, and create a sense of community.
Leslie Yerkes details precisely how eleven successful companies--including Southwest Airlines, Pike Place Fish, Isle of Capri Casinos, EmployEase, and Prudential--have integrated fun into the normal course of business. This new edition provides updates on how these same companies have grown, prospered, and continued to thrive--in spite of national tragedies, natural disaster, growing competition, and changing economic conditions--in part because of the culture they have created through what Yerkes calls "The Fun/Work Fusion."
Yerkes illustrates eleven principles--from capitalizing on the spontaneous to hiring good people and getting out of their way--that will inspire you to inject a sense of playfulness and joy into your workplace. Full of real-life examples, strategies, ideas, resources, tools, tips, and techniques, Fun Works will help any company in any industry become a place where people love to work.

LESLIE YERKES IS PRESIDENT of Catalyst Consulting Group, Inc. (www.changeisfun.com) an organizational development and change management consult- ing firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. Leslie’s business goal is to help people create sustainable organizations. Her life goal is to create a framework in which people can draw on their own resources to find creative solutions. Her clients have included Chrysler
Corporation, The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, United Church of Christ, International Steel Group, Mittal Steel USA-Cleveland, and NASA. A subspecialty of Leslie’s is making non-profits healthy and sustainable.
Leslie is a recognized consultant, author, and speaker through- out the United States and Europe. She is considered an expert in her field and is frequently quoted in the media. She is the coauthor of the bestselling 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work, Beans: Four Principles for Running a Business in Good Times or Bad, and They Just Don’t Get It! Changing Resistance into Understanding. Her works have been trans- lated into more than a dozen languages selling hundreds of thou- sands of copies world wide.
A graduate of Wittenberg University and Case Western Reserve University, she has taught at John Carroll University and Baldwin Wallace College. She is on the faculty at the Weatherhead Dively Center of Executive Education and the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University.