I feel that I keep coming back to the fun of working and how to accomplish this. A lot of people (is forced to) treat their working life as being completely different from their private life. I certainly agree in some ways, for example I have about 300 friends on Facebook / 273 followers on Twitter and only about 8 or 9 of these are the same person. I have chosen to split my two social lives, simply because I talk about different things in different crowds. Other people have other partitions (if any), but this works great for ME.
I have a point in all this babbling, and that is that I use similar tools for both my work life and my private life. On to the click-friendly list ;-)
The factors of fun-at-work are many, I will try to list a few that I find the most important. Feel absolutely free to disagree.
1. Colleagues / People
The people you surround yourself with are always important. There's a difference between work and private life here; you don't always get to choose your colleagues the same way you choose your friends. But for me, the people around me is the single most important fun factor.
2. Openness
To have the "official" permission to speak ones mind is something that is concidered pretty obvious in society (democracy and such...), but how is the situation inside Your Corporation Walls? By allowing people to speak their minds it's my strong opinion that these open companies will innovate and ellaborate a whole lot more than others.
3. Extra curricular activities
To do stuff that is not directly work-related at work has always existed; anyone for teambuilding? But it does the job of bringing colleagues closer together, to talk about other stuff for a while.
4. Freedom with responsibilities
The above is a classic mantra from my upbringing in the swedish school system. However I like it a lot. The individual can choose how to complete a task as long at it is done and in time. I am given huge freedom, but at the same time I have responsibilities. At work as well in society.
5. The right tools to get the work done
This is important from anyone from a construction worker to a webmaster. If you're not given great tools your capacity will suffer. In my off-work life I have a wide array of "tools" at my disposal to get my evenings and weekends to be as much fun as possible.
And to wrap this pretty long post up; Enterprise 2.0 is a part in all of the above. How?
Colleagues / People connect through E2.0. You find new friends that you didn't think you had in the organization.
Openness finds its way through the organization with help from Enterprise 2.0 - at least that's my theory.
Extra curricular activities is OK in E2.0-tools. You can and will talk/write about other stuff than just work, something that is "banned" in other IT-tools.
Freedom with responsibilities is a huge part of E2.0 and the new way of working.
The right tools to get the work done should be included in your Enterprise 2.0 software. If not, then try something else ;-)
Conclusion: Your everyday work WILL get more fun with E2.0. Not E2.0 alone, but it's a great start and/or a helper. And when we use similar behaviour and tools at work that we use off-work then things will get even better.
Happy new 2010 by the way, it will be an exciting one for sure.
Cheers,
/Gustav