Along one of the most popular pilgrimages in the world, El Camino de Santiago, in Spain, walkers are greeted with “buen Camino” to wish them a good way both physically and spiritually. My version of buen Camino was an enthusiastic and quintessentially Australian “Have fun!” followed by a wave. I would then wave back with a cheerful “thanks, I will!”

It wasn’t fun. Really, not at all.

I was constantly hungry, even while I was eating, and with each day a new pain developed in parts of my body that I didn’t know I had. Unfortunately, I did not experience the delayed sense of fun that ultra-marathon runners call Type Two Fun either. These superhuman athletes argue the pain and sense of despair they feel prevents them from having fun at the time, which is what they call Type One Fun – or just fun for the rest of us. But they do experience a retrospective type of fun once their sense of achievement kicks in and have a shower and a good rest. That fun is Type Two Fun.

I’m here to confirm that despite many showers and rest since my walk, fun has yet to make an appearance.

But ‘fun’ seems to have a shared quality about it, irrespective of how, when, or if it’s experienced. Fun can justify doing something as crazy as walking to Sydney – and working long hours. This aspect of fun has been capitalised on by proponents of the ‘office-as-playpen’ concept which once featured workplaces with colourful beanbags and ping-pong tables. Now, the talesmen of hip, cool and fun places to work are breathtaking digital installations in the lobby, in-house top chefs, games room, and furry babies walking around the office. However, the proposition is still the same: employees would stay put and work hard in a fun environment.

While designing experiences is as ancient as the earliest human impulse to develop rituals and ceremonies [28], the influx of experience designers whose main function is to conceive of unimaginable journeys in the workplace would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. Today, ‘experience’ is paramount.

However, if these experiences are not anchored back to how employees perform their tasks (division of labour) and how these tasks are then reintegrated (integration of effort) to meet the strategic objectives of their organisation, such embellishments of the workplace might turn out to be just gimmicks [29].

Workplace experiences that are disconnected from how the organisation itself is designed, might be well intended, but as ill-fitting as a ‘have fun’ is for someone who has been walking all day, feels miserable and hungry.

The resulting signpost:

figure a

This alignment could also help to avoid the workplace becoming a trophy for disciplines whereby those from property and design tether the ever-evolving notion of work to the office, and those in organisation design and information technology aim to free ‘work’ from it.