Structured Play in the Workplace: The Reconnection of Engagement

Photo by Antonio Gabola on Unsplash

What if a major problem at work is not the lack of focus, but instead, the lack of play? Wellbeing, as instructed by organisations, can be managed by reducing stress or increasing resilience, or squeezing mindfulness in between meetings. While these are useful techniques, what if there’s one major practice missing? Play does not have to be a break from work. What happens when it’s integrated into the way we work? A different type of intentional practice, designed to reconnect adults to their curiosity, experimentation and embodied engagement, suggested by research, could enhance the very capacities that complex work demands.

Play isn’t a luxury; some would consider it a necessity. Adults with responsibilities and careers and plans can still engage in joyful experiences. Those without them carry their heaviness home, blur the boundaries of work and their life outside it, spending their free time disengaged or doom scrolling. In new research by Ruddock and colleagues, there is a suggestion that play is deeply human and is being amputated from adulthood and may even be the explanation for the experiences of burnout, disengagement and discomfort, and in the workplace, a structured play program could be exactly the piece that’s missing. It’s well established that play is a necessity for childhood development; so what if engaging in play is actually a continuum for development, not a stage to grow out of?

Development of a structured play program sounds almost counterintuitive; forced play? But adults participating in activities designed to resemble play may be a great improver of wellbeing. This is not like the usual corporate intervention, not like performance coaching or mindfulness, but a well designed, evaluated and repeatable tool with measurable outco

me centred around what some would consider an indulgence.

Structured play does sound like a contradiction, because ‘structure’ in most people’s working lives sounds serious, and seriousness is not affiliated with playfulness. Meetings start with slides, not laughter and calendars are marked with deliverables, not enjoyment. Even still, the research finds that play, when intentional and communal, both elicits a novelty and improves overall wellbeing. Perhaps this is a challenge of the deep cultural assumption, that wellbeing in actuality is a precondition for productivity, not a bi-product.

Play is not just stress relief. Play can be a mode of being, opening the imagination and allowing creativity to come before strategy. Adults will rarely enter a space that is not controllable, because we have been taught that it’s not effective. Jobs reward optimisation and lack of risk taking, leaders are praised on foresight and the execution of tasks. Play, on the other hand, rewards embodied presence and relational openness. As with most new research on the value of play, it’s approached from a psychological perspective of restorative function; why wouldn’t we want to utilise a discovery that something of enjoyment can also benefit motivation and output in working lives? Are current workplace cultures misaligned with that which makes a person thrive? Recognising that adult wellbeing is not optional is an imperative missing part of the current systems humans participate in, that treat it as an external factor and not a core design constraint.

Children play to explore boundaries, rehearse future skills and find ways to express their internal states. Adults abandon it and wonder why they feel isolated or burnt out. Play may be the bridge for psychological integration; is it not the truth that adults, too, must explore their own boundaries, plan for the future and express their internalisations? When people play, emotion and imagination is reignited, things that the professional self tends to suppress. Play is a language of its own, it can’t be reattributed into something else, or something ‘corporate’.

Through the lens of depth psychology, play is not a luxury in adulthood, but one of psyche’s most natural integrative capacities. Play offers the unconscious a voice through symbol, movement, curiosity, and experimentation. During play, we are offered a space to explore uncertainty without threat and identify and work through new ways of being (without a weight of a fixed identity or persona). Play is a gateway to psychological wholeness, and is the tool that can be used to maintain it. In work cultures that can make room for play, imagination has the potential to be a resource, rather than a risk and ambiguity is not destabilising but a sort of fertiliser. Play allows energy to circulate, creativity to surface and connection to deepen by doing the opposite of forcing outcomes. It’s fluidity creates conditions where insight and engagement occur organically. The alternative narrative is that when play is welcomed at work, seriousness does not become diluted, but enriched, with the psyche’s restored capacity to adapt, relate and evolve.

 For the full research paper, published in the Journal of Play in Adulthood, 2025, follow this link:

All work and no play: A structured play program to improve adult wellbeing  | The Journal of Play in Adulthood

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