One person's fun is another person's headache.
At least one executive grew frustrated with how long it took to get things done at an e-commerce service provider. She complained that top executives wasted a lot of time in endless meetings and the mandatory fun atmosphere grated on her. Employees were told that if they wanted to have a meeting over a game of Ping-Pong, they should, she said. And a "dogs welcome'' policy turned the office into a near kennel.
"Some people do long for the days when everyone came to work and wore a suit and tie and sat at their desks without dogs,'' said Shawna M. Swanson, a senior associate specialising in employment law at law firm Fenwick & West.
"Some companies want to give the utmost freedom to their employees,'' Swanson said.
A lot of people think they can sue to keep dogs out of the workplace or to make people wear shoes in the office, but these are not legal issues, Swanson said.
At Petstore.com, everyone worked in a warehouse. There were not only dogs, but snakes, iguanas, parrots and ferrets wandering around, said Abigail Jacobs, a former employee. When it rained, the roof leaked. But they thought it was fun, she said.
"I was just wowed by the dot-com environment and the stock options,'' she said.
But the kooky culture wasn't enough to keep the company afloat, and Jacobs left shortly before Petstore was sold to Pets.com. She joined BlueLight.com, an Internet online service and retailer backed by Kmart. BlueLight is an Internet company with a casual workplace, but with the stability of a traditional company behind it, Jacobs said.
"It's like a start-up environment without the scary feeling,'' Jacobs said. "The culture is really fun. But we're not throwing lavish parties.''
Mandatory fun at technology companies is not something that sprang up with the Internet. In the 1970s, Silicon Valley's Tandem and Apple Computer threw big beer bashes. In the 1980s, Rolm and Borland built Olympic swimming pools. Genetech had weekly hula contests and beer bashes.
Then many of the tech companies grew up and began holding brown-bag substance-abuse lunches and afternoon sexual harassment seminars. As their billion-dollar valuations inflated, so did their liability concerns. They hired corporate attorneys and instituted company policies.
Even the free-spirited Excite@Home banned pets in the workplace because of sanitary reasons and allergies, said Stephanie Rudnick, the company's spokeswoman.
Now the April dot-com devaluation on Wall Street is making everyone take notice of fun in the workplace once again. Outlandish perks are always easier to justify when a stock price is soaring. Investors also begin to worry that the fun work culture can become the point rather than the perk.
Whether fun-based mission statements, foosball tables, video games, inflatable furniture, beanbag chairs, annual retreats and cultural czars can actually help a company build profits is debatable.
Some, like Jim Collins, co-author of Built to Last, a book examining corporate success, said it doesn't help. He finds very little evidence that a laid-back environment filled with employee perks has anything to do with becoming a great company.
In fact, mandatory fun can become a liability if it is mistaken as the company's primary focus, he said.
"People like to be part of something that wins and succeeds,'' Collins said.
Companies that create a culture of discipline win, he said, pointing to Cisco Systems and Intel.
"I can't think of a single traditional dot-com company that has cultivated a serious culture of discipline. Eventually there will be one, but it hasn't happened yet,'' Collins said.
The very best people never work just for the money or the perks; they want to be in a place where they can have an impact and in a work force populated by hard-working people who get things done, Collins said. They also hate hypocrisy and thrive in an environment that has a high degree of consistency, he said.
Whether a company has foosball tables or swimming pools doesn't matter in the end, Collins said. It's whether the people are motivated, happy and hard working.
Executives at Excite@Home think their people fit that mold.
The 6-year-old Internet company fights to keep a fun start-up culture at the workplace, even though it plans to add 1,800 employees to its work force of 2,700 in the next six months, Rudnick said.
Six months ago, the top executives at the company instituted the corporate happy hour to answer questions from employees and to have a little fun.
Employees banter over beer, wine and chicken wings every Friday at 4 pm.
"The competition in this market for good people is really fierce,'' Rudnick said. "So we're not going to stop doing cool things for the employees.''
But even at Excite@Home, the perks are changing as workers grow out of their 20s and into their 30s and 40s. Along with its two spiral slides, climbing wall, roller hockey court and gym, it is adding breastfeeding rooms and looking into on-site child care.
"The people who started these companies are all growing up now and getting married and having kids,'' Rudnick said, right before running off to her on-site kickboxing class. "But they still want to have fun."
