SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : PART THREE: EXTRAS THAT COUNT : Making Room for Fun and Games : Some Firms Find ‘All Work, No Play’ Hurts Productivity

At the Shalek Agency, having fun is serious business.

Employees and friends recently gathered for a beach party at Santa Monica’s tony Sand and Sea Club, where they drank beer, competed in volleyball games and played goofy relay races.

“We find a lot of excuses to have parties,” said Nancy Shalek, president of the 1 1/2-year-old advertising firm. “My party budget would hire an assistant account executive.”

Like many other managers, Shalek, 34, is finding that joy on the job can translate into a more productive work force.

Particularly in small companies, executives are beginning to realize that all work and no play is scarcely the best policy when it comes to improving teamwork and enhancing creativity. As a result, they are building recreation into the corporate culture.

Apple Computer Inc., based in Cupertino, Calif., holds a beer bust every Friday afternoon and encourages employees to get involved in company-sponsored skiing, running and biking. No one bats an eye when members of the Ultimate Frisbee Club scoot out at midday to toss the disc.

The president of a payroll services company in San Francisco camped out at 7 a.m. recently to buy a block of “Batman” tickets for employees and their families. About 70 moviegoers showed up, many in Batman T-shirts.

At Odetics, an Anaheim high-tech firm that makes robots and data recorders for space shuttles, the official Fun Committee brought in a phone booth for a ‘50s party to see how many people could cram into it. The magic number was 16.

Why all this attention to fun and games?

“It starts out with the idea that you spend more time at work than you do anywhere else, if you take away sleeping hours,” said Joel Slutzky, chairman and chief executive of Odetics, which founded its Fun Committee years ago. “You should want to get up and go to work.”

If employees look forward to the workday, he said, “then it will be that much easier to do their jobs in an innovative way.”

And that’s not the only benefit. Slutzky said his company also has less absenteeism, one of the lowest turnover rates of key people in the electronics industry and medical costs 20% below the industry average.

A survey by David J. Abramis, a professor of management at California State University, Long Beach, backs up what Slutzky has learned. Abramis questioned 341 Southern California employees and found that those who say they have fun on the job are generally less anxious and depressed, are more satisfied with their lives in general and tend to miss less work.

“Our best guess is these things are beneficial to the bottom line,” said Abramis, who is writing a book with the working title of “Making Work Fun.”

To be sure, not all employees need a party or outing to make work pleasant. Many get their kicks from solving problems or completing a project.

A flexible benefits program at Apple Computer, where employees routinely work long days, attempts to address the need for both fun and job satisfaction, according to Tim Larson, manager of health and fitness.

“People work extremely hard here, and management realizes the importance of a balanced life and stress release,” he said.

The company occasionally “works in a little work with the play,” turning something like river rafting into a team-building exercise.

Larson declined to say how much the company spends on fun. But with events such as the weekly beer bust--featuring catered food, free-flowing wine and beer and entertainment--expenses clearly mount up.

Slutzky of Odetics noted that fun events need not chew up a huge chunk of budget and should go beyond routine picnics and the like.

A “couch potato” contest--for employees “who wanted to get into fitness without working up a sweat”--cost just $50, which covered paper airplanes and miniature golf, among other activities. For Lakers Day, employees who wore purple and gold got a free lunch.

For Secretaries Day last year, managers dressed up as waiters and served lunch in the cafeteria. A company repertory theater has put on several plays. On Sept. 1, the Fun Committee held a surprise bash to celebrate the company’s 20th birthday.

“The importance, I think, is that it have a certain spontaneity,” Slutzky said of the atypical events.

But regular outings have their place too. Jude Bressman, a Disneyland spokeswoman, said 70 companies plan annual events at the theme park and hundreds of others make plans periodically to spend an evening in the Magic Kingdom.

The park’s biggest corporate event ever was in celebration of the Hughes Aircraft-General Motors merger in 1986, when 180,000 guests visited the park over nine days, courtesy of their employer.

Generally, small businesses find it easier to plan for fun than do large corporations.

Barbara Plourd, the president of Payday, the Payroll Company in San Francisco, who organized the “Batman” outing, said she and other hard-core backpackers at the firm have made a ritual of camping in Yosemite in late summer. “We have our own special place where we go,” Plourd said.

The company also annually invites employees’ children to visit for a day. The children get to play games and eat lunch as well as sit next to their parents to watch them work.

“Fun and humor are an absolute essence of life,” Plourd said. “To isolate that from the workplace is insane.”

Shalek, the advertising executive, is another boss who makes a point of having fun.

“We’re building a company, and building a company has a lot to do with how people want to work together,” she said. “We spend a lot of time working on building a team. One of the best ways I’ve found is to build friendships outside the workplace.”

So far, Shalek is convinced that the money spent is worthwhile. “It sure makes working here a whole lot nicer.”