Blog Post: The Workplayce

During the summer of 2007 I went on a cross country roadtrip with three guys in a RV.  The purpose of our Pursue the Passion tour was to interview people who had found a passion for their work, because as a corporate auditor, passion was something I was seriously lacking.  My goal was to create a website that would serve as a resource for people stuck in the what should I do with my life dilemma.  We proceeded to find a sponsor in Jobing.com and wound up interviewing a hundred seventy-five people over the course of sixteen thousand miles in four months.     

Our workplace, a mobile thirty foot RV that also served as our home, was somewhat of a mess.  We lived on twenty dollars a day for a hundred and twenty days. We got by on free Hot Pockets for two months (trust me, those forty-five days were just as bad as what the guy in the movie Super Size Me went through).  We never had a solitary, peaceful place to return to every night because there are not too many places to escape in a RV.  We crashed on fifty different couches, floors and/or balconies across the country.  By all means, our “workplace” could have been the most miserable, hard to deal with environment in America.    

For awhile, it was. 

As the fearless leader of the group, I took on a stance of viewing my friends as employees.  My goal in the journey had been to create a website that would turn into a prosperous career for all of us.  To get to that goal I believed that we had to work all the time to get to where we needed to be.  The spirit of the trip immediately morphed from exploratory journey to a working day that required the world and paid twenty dollars a day.  It showed that me that even the most fun situations could turn into stifling, dysfunctional environments.  

I eventually emerged from my clouded vision and the second half of the journey (the half where we mixed fun with work) created more memorable experiences and produced greater results for our website than before.  Our goal of making Pursue the Passion into a job came to fruition when the Jobing Foundation offered us the opportunity to share the lessons we learned from the trip with high school students across the country. 

We were able to do it by transforming the workplace into a workplayce.               

A question we concluded every interview with was “If you could go back to when you were 22, and offer yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?”  To take a page out of our book, if I could go back to the start of the trip, this is what I would offer myself based on what I learned by the end of the tour. 

Most employees that work in a job they hate focus on obtaining the things employers and bosses hate to offer.  Employees want more money to compensate for their unhappiness.  They want bonuses, raises and responsibility.  The employers grumble because they look at their excel spreadsheets and gripe that it cuts into their budget.  But employees forget all their negative reasons for more pay and benefits when they start to have fun.  Even though you may be unable to financially meet those needs and desires, you can still fulfill those gaps by making the workplace into a workplayce.  Do this by listening, thinking, and taking action.     

When you think you have nothing to offer, you still do.  You can offer yourself.