How Leaders Can Turn Hobbies into Creative Energy at Work

During school days, I wasn’t interested in academics as much as I was into extra-curricular activities and hobbies. The teachers did not discourage them but used to nudge me towards academics. The idea was that what I was doing was something ‘extra’ and therefore it would be better to allocate time towards academics. Similar thought prevails at the workplaces as well. Employees are expected to allocate their most productive time towards working for the job description.

With increasing reliance on automation and employee burnouts, the comparative advantage of firms would hinge on human capabilities, as the automation processes would be same for all the competitors. Human capabilities that the Artificial Intelligence cannot substitute such as creative thinking, systems thinking, critical thinking, cross-domain problem solving, and empathy are going to be the key differentiator in the future. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2025 reports that employers value analytical thinking, resilience-flexibility-agility, leadership & social influence, creative thinking, and empathy & active listening among the employees. Many such skills sought by the employers are considered ‘soft’ in nature but are becoming crucial with time as the conventional ‘hard’ skills are increasingly being automated.

However, employees face multifarious issues at workplace which prevents them from realizing their full potential. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 reports that only 21% employees and 27% managers remain ‘engaged’ with their work. About 62% employees were reported to be ‘not engaged’ and about 17% were reported to be ‘actively disengaged’ with their work. Only 33% employees evaluated their life as ‘thriving’, while 58% reported it as ‘struggling’ and 9% as ‘suffering’. Daily emotions such as stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness were reported in significant figures as well. The report estimates that if the global workforce was fully engaged, it would add US$9.6 trillion to the global GDP, which currently happens to be untapped.

This hints towards a dire need for engaging employees actively with their work which is possible when the employees find a purpose in their work and a sense of belongingness as well. The hobbies and creative pursuits hold a crucial place in a person’s life. A profession might not always be chosen by an employee, but the hobbies are always a personal choice. Therefore, in professional life, the hobbies must be appreciated independently for their own good and for the good they can bring to the employee’s contributions to the work.

A 2023 research (93,263 people, 16 countries) states that having a hobby could be associated with mental wellbeing, fewer depressive symptoms, and higher life satisfaction. Another 2019 research finds that cross-domain influences of creative skills are ubiquitous which indicates that creativity from one activity may impact in another activity as well. Therefore, one may expect that the skills associated with the hobbies of the employees could be utilized in the work as well. Moreover, promoting hobbies can prevent burnouts and promote wellbeing among the employees which can potentially boost the productivity considerably. Employee hobbies are a scalable and cost-effective way nurture those capabilities, improving wellbeing, and unlock innovation. It is time to shift hobbies from the margins on HR to the centre of talent strategy.

Leading companies have already begun institutionalizing promotion of employees’ hobbies to leverage their true potential. Google’s ‘20% rule’ has for long inspired employees to allocate their time to self-directed projects which relies on the belief that autonomy fuels invention. This way the organisation is benefitted by the creativity of the employees. Atlassian’s ShipIt event that happens once every quarter, encourages employees to form cross-functional teams and solve problems independently that they care about which leads to a make-test-learn loop in 24 hours. Adobe’s Kickbox supports employees with a DIY intrapreneurship kit that helps in providing training, seed finding, and tools to let employees validate an idea fast, without managerial gatekeeping. Such practices have been adopted by several companies across the geographies to promote employee engagement and boost productivity and creativity. They indicate that the structured freedom can lead to innovative outcomes.

What leaders can do to unlock creativity

Set clear and executive-level intent: Signalling that creative pursuits are a strategic asset and a part of talent & innovation agenda, not a side project. Incorporate both macro (Skills shift in the market) and micro (wellbeing risks) level planning to enhance effectivity.
Create time and space: The employers may choose one of the three proven models mentioned above which are: allocating specific share of time for the creative pursuits, conducting hackathons periodically, and providing support for testing ideas. This results in structured management of employees’ time and efforts in the strategic direction.
Integrate hobbies with design thinking and systems thinking: Encouraging creative hobbies (E.g.: painting, music, photography) as inputs to prototyping and storytelling may enhance design thinking skills in employees. Similarly, promoting strategic hobbies (E.g.: strategy games, ensemble music, gardening) that help in pattern recognition and feedback-loop thinking may boost systems thinking skills among employees.
Establish a recognition system: Creating a system to publicly recognize the creative efforts (not only outcomes) may function as a nudge to gradually develop a workplace culture where creative efforts happen to be unbound.
Measure what really matters: Designing indicators that measure the conversion of personal energy into enterprise outcomes is crucial. Such indicators could be built around themes such as employee participation, learned skills, idea throughput, engagement & wellbeing, business impact.

Since creativity is subjective, algorithms cannot be trained to do it like humans do. Therefore, the creative side of the human persona has unlocked new horizons of possibilities when the productivity is being increasingly automated. Integrating hobbies into professional work can help achieve ikigai of the workers and unleash their full potential. Steve Jobs’ enthusiasm for calligraphy led him to audit those classes which seemed irrelevant but eventually helped him significantly while designing the first Macintosh. LinkedIn’s InDay policy encourages employees pursue independent tasks that they find meaningful and purposeful once a month that provides them with a larger purpose integrated to their work and results in life satisfaction. It is believed that one particular day energizes the employees for the entire month.

The above examples hint that hobbies are not distractions from the ‘real work’, rather they are the most practical levers that the leaders must cultivate in their organisational culture to shape systems thinkers, protect mental health, and sustain innovation. In today’s AI-accelerated world, the scarcest and valuable resource is energized human creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. The organisations that design for the hobbies with time, tooling, and trust will lead the next decade of ideas.

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