There Was Room for It

I was reading an article the other day that included "Five Ideas to Boost Team Morale." The suggestions were familiar: virtual coffee breaks, public employee recognition, wellness activities, online team games, and weekly check-ins.

There's nothing inherently wrong with any of those ideas. In fact, many of them can, indeed, contribute to team morale. They can even be enjoyable.

But as I read, I found myself thinking that they also miss the mark.

Too often, these kinds of morale boosters can feel like obligations. They're usually created by people who genuinely care about their colleagues and are trying to build connection within constraints they didn't create. Sometimes the "fun" happens during the workday, only to be paid for after hours as people catch up on everything they didn't get done. Instead of creating the intended boost to morale, it can have the opposite effect.

As I thought about it, I realized that the happiest teams I've been part of weren’t joyful because someone planned joy. 

They were joyful because there was room for it.

The Pop-Tarts (and the Animal Teeth)

Years ago, I worked on a team where six of us shared a large cubicle. It wasn't glamorous, but it meant there was always conversation, someone asking a question across the aisle, or laughter floating over the tops of our monitors. 

One day it came up that one of my colleagues had never eaten a Pop-Tart. Another colleague and I were appalled—not because Pop-Tarts are culinary masterpieces. In fact, we agreed they have very few redeeming qualities. But they're an important cultural reference point, and we felt duty-bound to correct this glaring gap in her education.

That afternoon, we ran to the store and bought strawberry, blueberry, and maple Pop-Tarts. The next day, between meetings, the three of us slipped into the office kitchen, toasted them, and watched her try both the toasted and untoasted versions.

She hated them—exactly as we expected.

We laughed until it was time to head back to our desks and the spreadsheets waiting for us.

Another memory came back to me from another team. A group of us once became curious about what sugary drinks actually did to teeth. Someone had a few found a few animal teeth in her desk (don’t your colleagues keep animal teeth in their desks?). We decided to conduct our own less-than-scientific experiment, soaking them in different beverages to see what would happen over time.

Eventually, we used the results in a retreat to spark a conversation about health education.

But that's not why I remember it.

I remember stopping by to check on the jars. Comparing notes. Laughing at our observations. Turning a simple work-related question into something that brought us together.

I don't think either the Pop-Tart taste test or the teeth experiment happened simply because there was an empty half hour between meetings. They also didn’t happen because they were on someone’s work plan or neatly tucked into a calendar invitation labeled "team building."

Those moments happened because there was room for them.

They happened because we worked in an environment where we understood what mattered. Expectations were well defined. Priorities were clear. We had ownership over our work and enough autonomy to decide how to accomplish it. The workload was demanding—we certainly worked long hours at times—but it was manageable. No one expected us to account for every minute of every day.

In other words, we were trusted.

That trust gave us room to make choices. Sometimes those choices meant grabbing a couple of boxes of Pop-Tarts. Sometimes they meant checking on an experiment with animal teeth soaking in sugary drinks. More often, they meant lingering in a conversation for five extra minutes because it was interesting, or because a colleague needed to think something through.

None of those moments took away from the work: they were part of the environment that made the work sustainable.

Designing for Humanity

The more I reflect on those teams, the more I realize the organizations didn't intentionally create joy. They created the conditions where joy had room to emerge. Joy was something the organizations made room for through the way the work itself was designed. 

When people understand what success looks like, have a manageable workload, and are trusted to exercise judgment, they don't spend their energy proving they're working. They can devote that energy to doing good work—and, every now and then, to being fully human alongside the people they're doing it with.

I think the reason that so many morale-boosting activities fall flat is not because there's anything wrong with trivia games or pizza lunches or virtual coffee breaks. Those efforts are often thoughtful and generous.

The challenge is that joy rarely arrives on command, and if the underlying systems don't create space for it, no amount of programming can make up for it.

Virtual work is often held up as the reason we've lost these moments. I'm not convinced that's true.

Remote teams are just as capable of experiencing joy. However, I think we've tried to recreate connection by scheduling it. The online trivia games, virtual happy hours, and even the virtual s'mores kits that many of us received during the pandemic were very thoughtful attempts to help people feel less isolated. Yet because they were so carefully orchestrated, they often felt hollow. We logged on, participated, and logged off, leaving little room for the unexpected.

Perhaps what virtual teams need isn't more programmed fun. Perhaps they need more of the in-between: The informal text after a meeting, the meme that makes a colleague laugh, a few agenda-free minutes before everyone jumps into business, the colleague you can message after a difficult meeting just to ask, "Did that make sense to you?" or "Can you believe what just happened?" before getting back to work.

Those moments may seem small, but they remind us that there are real people on the other side of our screens. They create the kinds of relationships that make work not only more enjoyable, but more resilient.

The Role of Leaders

If joy emerges from the way organizations are designed, then I think leaders have an important role to play. Their role is not to create joy. Rather, they become stewards of the conditions where joy can emerge.

That means creating clarity, setting priorities that people can navigate, trusting people with autonomy over their work, and designing workloads that leave enough room to think, to connect, and occasionally to laugh over something as wonderfully unnecessary as a Pop-Tart. 

Joy isn't the reward for great work.

It isn't something leaders give people.

It already belongs to them.

Perhaps one of leadership's quiet responsibilities—and one of an organization's greatest opportunities—is to become stewards of the conditions where joy can flourish.