Humour & Employee Morale

In today’s uncertain work environment, humor isn’t an option; it’s a necessary way to boost morale. When employees clown around, they’re not wasting valuable time, they’re making use of one of the few tools available to increase and maintain their esprit de corps. Laughter may not change the external reality, but it can certainly help people survive it. This has been proven in some pretty dire situations. Psychologist cite examples of how a group of Auschwitz inmates put on shows to provide laughter for the camp population so as to make jokes to save ourselves from deep depression. Somehow these people, on the brink of death, realized that their morale and survival depended on keeping their ability to laugh alive. As a group, they took the time and energy to make it happen.
Even though nothing could be as horrible as Auschwitz, people in almost all workplaces can learn from this example. Take the time and energy to share humor. Those brave concentration camp inmates proved that humor is a choice, and no matter how much adversity people face, whether at work or in their personal lives, they can still choose laughter. In fact, the worse a situation gets, the more important it becomes to make that choice.

Making It Happen In Your Organization
So what can organizations do to encourage the use of humor as a coping mechanism? We can usually turn boring announcements into a stand-up comedy routine. CEOs/top management should empower people to believe that work should be fun too. They can easily set precedents through their own behavior, and by encouraging employees to enjoy their jobs, they make it safe for the people they employ to use humor by leading the way.
And the payoff? Employees will be more enthusiastic about their work as they will love working for the company because it was so much fun. And their enjoyment will be reflected in higher productivity and better client interactions. In order to help employees use humor, organizations need to provide them with the tools and to set an example. Like in a client organization I started every training group with an exercise called “the rubber chicken toss.” i.e. providing crisis counselors with baskets of toys to use as stress-busters, and made it clear that humor was encouraged as part of our organizational culture. These relatively inexpensive interventions did nothing to change the adversity the group faced, but they did create an atmosphere in which going to work was still fun. I often had crisis line workers tell me that one of the reasons they kept coming back was because of how much fun they had. And if a crisis line, where workers regularly deal with suicide can be made fun, so can any workplace!

Laughter as A Tonic!
As more and more organizations reengineer, merge, restructure, downsize, right size, and even capsize, employees confront uncertainty on an almost daily basis. The rules keep changing in terms of what they’re supposed to do, how they’re supposed to do it, which they do it for, and whether they get to do it at all. And since most have little or no control over the making of these rules, the result is often a sense of powerlessness that translates into increased stress, decreased wellness, demoralization, absenteeism, and lower productivity, all of which affect rates of employee retention. And we all know that people are an organization’s number one asset, and losing them costs money. So the big question for both individuals and organizations is: how do you keep up spirits, continue to work effectively, and maintain health and sanity in a crazy-making situation? I often use my team of welfare workers to spread cheer through events of laughter. This effectively repels despair, cynicism, bitterness, or negativity. As one worker stated, “We could either cry, or we could laugh, but you can only cry for so long. We’d had enough of crying, and it was time to do something else – so we laughed.”
Organizations need to encourage employees to take control over the one aspect of the situation they do control - how they choose to respond to it. And on those days where workers feel overwhelmed, overworked, and have no idea what’s going to happen next, the only rational, life-affirming response is to go find some colleagues, and break out the clown noses, and leverage the energy of life giving humour. And it costs no money and also enhances intelligence as the basis of humour is knowledge combined with empathy.
-Anshumali Saxena www.soilindia.net