The benefits of workplace humour

There is unanimous agreement that humour serves to diffuse tense situations and can provide a therapeutic and cathartic effect when negative emotions are high. Recent studies have found that stress costs Australian workplaces millions of dollars each year. In his longitudinal study of what made for ‘success for life', Dr George Vaillant found humour to be one of the key coping mechanisms that ensured stress didn't kill more quickly and commonly.^[7]

Humour helps people to diffuse stress by enabling them to view the world with perspective. Those in stressful situations might not be able to change the reality of the situation, but they do have control over their sense of perspective about it. Humour adjusts meaning so that the event is not so powerful. As Shakespeare wrote: ‘For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' (Hamlet: Act II: Scene II).

Humour can affect motivation and productivity. According to research, people who laugh a lot work better and faster. One survey showed that 84% of executives and personnel directors believe that employees with a sense of humour do better work. People who say they have fun at work are also more satisfied with their jobs, are better able to meet the demands of their jobs and are less likely to be absent or late.^[8] People in a good mood organise data better, are more creative in word association and do better in tasks involving memory. Humour is said to improve decision making and negotiating abilities as well.

Humour can be a creative force. It stimulates intellectual play with ideas. Laughter provides a psychological stress reducer as it snaps our thinking to another channel (what Norman Cousins called ‘train wrecks of the mind'^[9]). This is because one of the characteristics of humour is incongruity. People find something humorous when it is incongruous or mismatched. Good jokes guide people down one path only to track them onto another. The tracking is called the punch line. As people are ‘tracked over', their thinking shifts, breaking their mind-set and this leads to increased creativity.

Humour can facilitate learning. According to John Cleese, people learn nothing when they are asleep and very little when they are bored. If they have to take anything in, they have to be interested; and if they have to remember it, they have to be involved emotionally. He believes that nothing can compare with humour for this power to burn lessons indelibly into the consciousness.^[10]

Humour can provide a competitive advantage because employees are attracted to working for, and doing business with, companies that look like they are having fun. Today's highly mobile workforce shops around for the right corporate culture-preferably one full of fun activities, camaraderie and cutting-edge technologies. These attributes, rather than remuneration, can affect the decision about whether to come, to stay or to go. And the more fun they're having, the more prepared employees are to go the extra mile.