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Michael Kerr, the author of “You can’t Be Serious! Putting Humor to Work” shares that work has an insanely important impact on our lives, so why make it harder than it has to be? When we talk about the main traits of a good leader, the ones that usually come to mind are: strategic vision, business acumen, determination, humility, empathy, resilience, energy, and the list goes on. The sorry sidelining of humour goes back a long way - in The Republic, Plato said that humour distracted people from more important things.
Now, some 2,500 years later, evidence suggests quite the opposite. Leaders with a well-developed sense of humour are 27% more admired and credible than the average and their teams are 15% more committed. These are both essential leadership traits: good reasons for looking at humour in the workplace in a completely different light.
In workplaces around the world, a bit of humour has shown to go a long way towards making it a more enjoyable place to spend eight or so hours a day. But for every genuinely funny employee or boss, there are others whose unfunny or inappropriate jokes make colleagues wince. So treading carefully, how exactly does humour help both improve a workplace and the standing of the person who is good at it?
In our latest Milieu Insight study, we surveyed 6,000 employees across Southeast Asia on their overall sentiments towards humour at the workplace and their views towards leaders and colleagues who show humour at work.
Our study found that leaders who show humour at the workplace are generally seen as likeable across Southeast Asia - this is particularly evident in Indonesia (69%), Singapore (59%), and Thailand (55%) while other markets such as Malaysia, Philippines, and Vietnam also associate humour at the workplace with smartness and respectability.
“Laughter is a social signal among humans. It’s like a punctuation mark.” - Professor Carl Marci, Harvard Medical School
Across Southeast Asia, humour at work is perceived to reduce stress/burnout (63%) and improve employee/boss relationships (60%). Respondents in Singapore (54%) and the Philippines (60%) also expressed that it really establishes team unity and positive norms in the office, while more than half in Vietnam (54%) feel that humour increases the sense of belonging amongst colleagues.
Sometimes a bad dad joke can literally help you get paid
Studies have also shown that something as simple as adding a lighthearted line at the end of a sales pitch — like “My final offer is X and I’ll throw in my pet frog” — can increase customers’ willingness to pay by 18%. So why does this work? Part of it is that shared laughter accelerates a feeling of closeness and trust, and such interactions are viewed as more intimate.
Why so serious?
While laughter creates good workplaces and helps managers relate with their employees, many are concerned about the drawbacks of exercising their funny bones. Results from our study showed that while generally Southeast Asians are comfortable with laughing out loud in front of their reporting managers, Malaysia (44%) and Thailand (40%) show higher discomfort to do so.
When asked what concerns they think humour at the workplace may cause, these are the top 4 concerns regionally:
- Colleagues will not take your opinions seriously (32%)
- Encourages brown-nosing behaviour (i.e trying too hard to please someone, especially someone in position of authority) (30%)
- Creates embarrassing/awkward situations (30%)
- It will be seen as unprofessional (29%)
While the majority regionally are in agreement that workplace cultures that promote humour are more resilient in stressful situations (75%), about a third surveyed feel uncomfortable cracking jokes (35%) or laughing out loud (32%) when their reporting manager is around.
Humour is a powerful springboard for innovation and creating a good atmosphere at work. The problem, some would say, is that humour is subjective: What you find amusing or side-splittingly light-hearted, Henry in HR and Ahmad in accounting most certainly do not.
A sense of humour that starts with being able to laugh at ourselves and to use it intelligently, selectively and with a focus on goals, as what Juan Carlos Cubeiro explains so aptly, “is not about telling jokes or being funny but discovering people’s individual sense of humour, the best things to joke about at work, knowing how to tell memorable anecdotes and the mistakes to avoid.”
