Does It Pay to Be Funny in the Workplace?

We’ve all heard that laughter is the best medicine but did you know that it could also make your office a happier place to work, improve your standing among colleagues and even increase the size of your paycheck?

A more enjoyable place to be

Having a sense of humour at work can make all the difference to your work day, making your office a more enjoyable place to be. It can help reduce stress and emotional exhaustion as well as fostering a more supportive environment that encourages creativity and team building (Silverberg, 2017 ⁴; Kerr, 2017 ²). This doesn’t have to mean telling joke after joke, simply creating an environment where staff can have fun will improve morale.

So what can you do to have more fun in your workplace? Michael Kerr, author of The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses are Laughing All the Way to the Bank suggests trying some of the following ideas:

Crazy Hour No need for the full hour, 5 minutes will do. Try this to combat the mid-afternoon blues. At the given time, encourage all your staff to get up and do something silly to get everyone laughing. The sight of everyone spinning around in their chair for thirty seconds ought to do it!

First One to Say "Good Morning!" There’s nothing like a little friendly competition between colleagues. The game is simple: keep score of which person greets the other(s) first each morning. Just beware of your workmates hiding in the car park or under your desk, waiting to claim their victory!

Laugh Offs Get your team together to hold a laugh contest where staff compete for the funniest, loudest, longest, craziest laugh. (Kerr, 2016 ¹)

More confident and competent

Being able to have a laugh with colleagues or employees also changes the way they see you. Professor Maurice Schweitzer, co-author of the study Risky Business: When Humour Increases and Decreases Status, found "that a worker or boss who successfully use [sic] humour is seen as both confident and competent, which in turn increases his or her status" (Silverberg, 2017 ⁴).

"The funnier the executives…the bigger the bonuses"

It’s not just your attitude or status that can be affected. Research suggests that executives with a sense of humour actually perform better at work. A study by Fabio Sala, from the Hay Group’s McClelland Center, showed that "executives who had been ranked as outstanding used humor more than twice as often as average executives". Furthermore "the size of their bonuses correlated positively with their use of humor... In other words, the funnier the executives were, the bigger the bonuses." (Sala, 2017 ³).

At AJ Products, we take our work seriously but not ourselves - it's why we've spent 45 years making fun of ourselves in our adverts, catalogues and on our website, and why we never like to miss an April Fools Day! After all, we spend a lot of time at work so it's important to have fun, make your workplace a home away from home and enjoy quality time with your colleagues.