How to Fit Play Into Your Busy Workweek

Here’s the thing: play isn’t optional if you want a high-performing team. It’s not just about fun or morale. It’s about how your team thinks, connects, and performs—especially under pressure.

When your people are stressed, disconnected, or mentally drained, performance takes a hit. Decisions slow down. Miscommunication creeps in. Engagement drops. You’ve seen it—and it’s costing you more time than you realise.

But play? Play does the opposite.

Play activates the brain’s executive functions—the same systems responsible for problem-solving, creativity, and decision-making. It’s been shown to release dopamine and endorphins, sharpen mental flexibility, and reduce stress. In short, it helps people think better, work faster, and collaborate more effectively.

Think of it like this: play is the recharge button your team needs to operate at full power. And it doesn’t take hours. A few moments of strategic, intentional play can reset focus, boost mood, and shift a team’s energy in real time.

Still think you don’t have time for play? Consider this: teams that don’t play are more likely to misfire, burn out, or disconnect. Teams that do—even briefly—are quicker to adapt, more aligned, and more energised.

In a high-stakes, high-output work culture, play isn’t a pause. It’s a performance tool.

Quick pause. Shut down the mental tabs. Take a breath.

Now rewind—not to last quarter, but back to childhood.

Picture it: riding your bike until the streetlights came on, building blanket forts, chasing your friends around the yard. You weren’t tracking ROI or planning your next one-on-one. You were fully in it—present, alive, lit up.

What did it feel like?
Joy? Curiosity? Freedom? Confidence?

Ironically, all the things your team needs today were baked into that experience: resilience, trust, imagination, focus.

Here’s the kicker: you didn’t lose the ability to play. You just stopped giving yourself permission.

We grew up, got serious, and started equating play with wasting time. But the science says otherwise:

“The state of play is a state of mind. When accessed, it brings out our most adaptive, creative, and resilient selves.”
— Dr. Stuart Brown, National Institute for Play

So, hold onto that memory. Those feelings?
They’re not just nostalgia—they’re the edge your team’s been missing.

Let’s get real—your team doesn’t need another scheduled block of time they’ll silently dread or reschedule. The beauty of play is that it doesn’t need to be big to be effective. What it needs is consistency and intention.

Here’s how to make it happen without breaking the rhythm of your week:

Start with What You’re Already Doing

Play doesn’t require extra time in the calendar—it just requires a shift in how you use the time you already have.

• Use the Connection Deck as a 3-minute warm-up to deepen team understanding in meetings, especially at the start of the week.
• Begin your monthly team check-in by revisiting insights from the Play Personalities Quiz, and ask how each team member has brought their unique style of play to work.
• Drop in a challenge from our monthly brainteaser series to spark creative thinking and stimulate cognitive flexibility—especially helpful before strategy sessions or problem-solving workshops.

Expert Tip: Teams don’t need more time together—they need more quality in the time they already share. Intentional play delivers that quality.

Distributed or hybrid teams don’t need to be in the same room to share the benefits of play. Asynchronous activities make space for everyone to participate—no scheduling required.

• Start a “Guess Who?” photo challenge in your team chat.
• Post a weekly prompt in Teams or Slack based on the Play Personalities (e.g. “Explorer Challenge: Learn something new and share it”).
• Launch a shared leaderboard using one of our ready-to-go digital mini-games to spark some healthy competition.

This isn’t downtime—it’s strategic connection-building that keeps momentum high and silos low.

Reuse, Repurpose, Repeat

You don’t need 52 new ideas. You need 2–3 great ones that you rotate and build into your culture.

Simplicity wins. Consistency transforms.

That’s why we developed the Play Hub—an exclusive toolkit available to all CCE clients. It’s filled with fast, practical, high-impact activities you can plug straight into your week, tailored to team needs and ready to go.

Let’s talk return on time.

The truth is, the time you don’t invest in play often comes back as lost productivity, miscommunication, and disengagement. That’s not theory—that’s reality for time-poor teams under pressure.

When teams don’t feel connected, everything takes longer:

• Conversations go in circles.
• Decisions stall or get revisited.
• Emails pile up because no one knows where to start—or who’s even owning what.
• Burnout creeps in, and performance dips follow.

Play interrupts that cycle.

By embedding play into your week—even briefly—you’re investing in trust, clarity, and collaboration. And those pay off fast.

A Harvard Business Review study found that teams who communicate effectively are up to 25% more productive than those who don’t​. That kind of edge isn’t gained by pushing harder—it’s gained by connecting better.

And connection doesn’t require hours. It requires intention.

When your team plays:

• They align faster.
• They solve problems with less conflict.
• They actually enjoy showing up to work—which is still one of the strongest predictors of long-term retention.

So no—play isn’t stealing time from your team. It’s giving it back.

Let’s bring it back to where we started: time.

If the idea of integrating play still feels like a stretch, remember this—play is not a distraction from work. It’s a performance strategy hidden in plain sight.

And if you’re too busy to implement something that helps your team move faster, think more clearly, and collaborate better? That’s not a time problem. That’s a missed opportunity.

Play doesn’t demand more hours—it gives them back by reducing miscommunication, increasing motivation, and cutting down on time lost to disengagement or rework. It’s a smarter way to work—not an additional one.

So what’s your next step?

And here’s the best part: if you’re a Corporate Challenge Events client or participant in 2025, you already have the tools you need.

Inside the Play Hub, you’ll find:

• Ready-to-run activities you can use in minutes
• Team icebreakers and energisers designed for in-person or hybrid teams
• eBooks and leadership guides to help you embed play into culture long-term
• Offsite venue inspiration and planning tips to get your team into flow
• And a plethora of science-backed evidence you can take straight to leadership to help make the case for play

One small step is all it takes to shift how your team thinks, connects, and performs.

So instead of asking “do we have time to play?”—

Ask this: can we really afford not to?