Don't take the job

Fun is diagnostic

I found the whole thing a little rude, to be honest. Twenty minutes. That's how long I'd been sat in the waiting room, awaiting an interview for a job at a very large financial institution you will have heard of.

There are only so many glossy brochures you can stomach before the frustration creeps in. I checked my invite several times. Yes, I was in the right place. Only, I wasn't. After twenty-five minutes the receptionist, looking a little sad for me, came over to tell me I was in the wrong building. They were expecting me five miles down the road, at a satellite office. Nice start, Rob.

I nudged my way through traffic and finally arrived at the proper interview some fifty minutes later than expected. Maybe they were in a rush, maybe they didn't care, maybe I was just so damn good — which I suspect was not true — but after a brief and pointless discussion about a network diagram, they offered me the job there and then. Start Monday.

It has to remain one of the easiest and most straightforward interviews the world has ever seen. It was so easy that I couldn't stop thinking about it. All the way home, that evening, through the night and into the next morning.

So much so that I called them back and asked for an office tour before I signed on the line. After much pushback they finally relented. As I toured the office, the hiring manager tried his hardest to keep me away from people. There was either something unsuitable about me, or about them. There was definitely something wrong with the office — the whole vibe, sense and feeling of the place was, well, dour. Deathly quiet, not a murmur, barely a smile in a room of at least a hundred.

Inevitably he was stolen away for a quick discussion, and I seized my chance to speak to a young man. I said Hi!. He said: don't take the job. His directness surprised me; his certainty impressed me. He was clearly not the right person to speak to, so I noodled over to someone else, a woman looking serious and studious. I said Hi!. She said: don't take the job.

Neither offered an explanation, neither seemed to be joking, both looked utterly miserable — like the other ninety-eight people. The manager finally returned. I declined the job, and likely saved myself a blip on my CV.

I've come to understand that fun, joy, laughter, spirit and hope are not fluffy. They are not a nice to have. They are not something we do on a Friday for an hour before the weekend lands. They are the bedrock of a good business. They are part of the engine of success.

Organisations are fluent in numbers. Dashboards, targets, forecasts, projections. The instruments of measurement are everywhere, and leaders have learned to read them well. They are essential, but incomplete.

There is another signal — subtler, more human, often more accurate.

Fun.

Not forced laughter. Not manufactured enthusiasm or hollow team-building rituals. Not the performance of engagement surveys and pulse checks. Not forced fun, which brings its own particular misery to everyone caught in it.

Real enjoyment. Moments of lightness. Shared humour. Energy in the room that doesn't need to be explained. The sense that people are engaged in what they do, challenged by it, bringing lightness to work that is serious, and finding their place in it.

Fun is not fluffy. It is information. It is an early warning sign, as Paul Hawken suggests in his book Growing a Business.

When people are engaged in meaningful work — connected to something larger than the task, moving towards a hopeful future, supported by those around them — you can see it, you can sense it, you can feel it. They collaborate more willingly. They take risks more freely. The conversation before the meeting starts is as alive and enjoyable as the meeting itself.

And when that disappears, well — it's only a matter of time until the numbers start to show it.

The silence grows heavier. Conversations shrink. Conflict increases. Eyes lower. Energy drains. Those wonderfully human moments of connection that once punctuated the day have stopped happening.

Fun, understood this way, is an early warning system — a cultural barometer, a signal that something is under strain, usually long before the spreadsheets catch it and the dashboards show it.

This doesn't mean every day must sparkle and brim with laughter and fun and unicorns. Work has seasons: pressure and release, effort and rest, periods that are genuinely hard. That is not a problem to solve — it is the nature of consequential work. It's a rhythm.

But over time, the average should lean toward something that brings enjoyment to the work. Not weight. Not endurance. Not the stacked heaviness of a system that has forgotten why it exists.

When teams rarely laugh, hesitate to speak, or move through the day without energy, the issue isn't a lack of entertainment or free cakes. It is something much deeper.

Clarity, alignment, trust, purpose, meaning — the climate, in which good ideas move towards value, or stumble on the way.

Because genuine engagement emerges when people believe their effort matters, that progress is visible, that learning is welcomed, that the relationships around them are safe, and that they are moving towards something bigger than the work itself. Those are not soft considerations, or sentimental posters on the wall. They are the operating conditions of a healthy system.

Fun cannot be commanded. It can only be cultivated.

This is the heart of what we mean when we talk about the Engine — creativity and climate, the conditions that let good work happen. The climate people work in cannot help but show up in the actual people. A leader who keeps an eye out for joy notices challenges early.

Fun is not frivolous, or a nice-to-have. It is diagnostic — a subtle and important indicator of whether the system is nourishing or draining the people within it. Not a measure of happiness — a measure of health.

When the fun declines, the spirit drops and the joy erodes, the question is not how to restore morale. The question is not whether we should buy pizzas. The question is not whether an away-day might work. The question is what the absence of fun is pointing to.

Because the signal is always pointing somewhere.