section_path: Workplace
section_name: Workplace
paragraph_text: Workplace
  
  There has been extensive research on the benefits of play among children, youth, and adolescence. Overlooked are the benefits of play for adults—more specifically, adults who spend a lot of time in the workplace. Many adults in North America are in the workforce and spend half of their waking hours in a workplace environment with little to no time for play. Play in this context refers to leisure-type activities with colleagues during lunch breaks or short breaks throughout the working day. Leisure activities might include physical sport activities, card games, board games, video games, foosball, ping-pong, yoga, and boot-camp sessions.
  
  Playing games may promote a persistent and optimistic motivational style and positive affect. Positive affect enhances people's experiences, enjoyment, and sense of satisfaction, during their engagement with a task. While people are engaged in work, positive affect increases the satisfaction they feel from the work, and this increases their creativity and improves their performance on problem-solving tasks as well as other tasks. The development of a persistent motivational style charged with positive affect may lead to lasting work success.
  
  Work and play are mutually supportive. Employees need to experience the sense of newness, flow, discovery, and liveliness that play provides. This provides the employee with the sense that they are integrated within the organization, and therefore they feel and perform better.
  
  Incorporating play at work results in more productivity, creativity and innovation, higher job satisfaction, greater workplace morale, stronger or new social bonds, improved job performance, and a decrease in staff turnover, absenteeism, and stress. Decreased stress leads to less illness, which results in lower health care costs. Play at work may help employees function and cope when under stress, refresh body and mind, encourage teamwork, trigger creativity, and increase energy while preventing burnout.
  
  Companies that encourage play at work, whether short breaks throughout the day or during lunch breaks, are more successful because this leads to positive emotion among employees. Risk taking, confidence in presenting novel ideas, and embracing unusual and fresh perspectives are associated with play at work. Play can increase self-reported job satisfaction and well-being. Employees experiencing positive emotions are more cooperative, more social, and perform better when faced with complex tasks.
  
  Contests, team-building exercises, fitness programs, mental health breaks, and other social activities make the work environment fun, interactive, and rewarding. Playfighting, i.e. playful fights or fictive disputes, may contribute to organizations and institutions, as in youth care settings. Staff tries to down-key playfight invitations to "treatment" or "learning," but playfighting also offers youth and staff identificatory respite from the institutional regime. Playfighting is a recurrent pattern in the social life of a youth care institution and sits at the core of what inmates and staff have to deal with