Laughter is the best medicine.
It’s not. It’s, in fact, the entire pharmaceutical store.
No matter what life throws at you professionally or personally, laughing at the chaos can help you maintain a balance, lighten the vibe, and restrict dreaded burnouts.
But when you run your own business, it is difficult to afford a break. You are constantly thinking about:
- Maximizing your profits
- Skyrocketing your revenue
- Bringing out your employees’ highest potential
If you have been asking yourself, “Is humour in the workplace good?” let me give you the answer:
YES
You can, and in fact, you should build a work culture that welcomes lighthearted moments at your workplace.
How can I be so confident?
Let me explain…
Why Is Humour Important At The Workplace?
Well, it’s been 5 years since I kick-started my entrepreneurial journey, and one of the critical things that I have noticed throughout my journey is the importance of humour and laughter at your workplace.
You need to understand that every employee working at your organization is a human being. To perform to their maximum potential, they need some joyful moments that can help boost their morale to tackle challenges in a better way.
But the problem with today’s business culture, especially in India, is that organizations’ foremost priority is boosting their profit margins by exerting pressure on their employees.
It has only resulted in physical and mental exhaustion of the employees and created a negative environment across the corporate culture.
But with humour and laughter moments between working hours, the entire environment can switch tables, hence, positively impacting the organization.
A tremendous transformation in an organization’s work culture focuses on creating a happy and lighthearted environment compared to organizations that focus on business numbers.
Here’s what my experience says:
Importance of Humour in Workplace Culture
An organization having a fun and light environment with a blend of humour, laughter, and positivity reflects that the organization’s culture is encouraging.
The work culture is more innovative and less hierarchical. People being more open to humour also highlights that the organization wants its employees to be themselves and not be robots putting in shifts to achieve a specified target.
Pressure, stress, and a boring environment will only result in people experiencing burnout and loss of quality workforce. Just like a flower, an employee needs a good healthy environment to blossom and radiate the best aura to its surroundings.
If you try to place a flower in a dark room, it won’t blossom under situations like a sophisticated jail.
And if an employee is only under pressure and working day in and day out seriously towards achieving a specific business outcome, the employee’s efficiency will degrade drastically.
Ultimately, it will affect your business and the career of the employee.
I have shortlisted the top five points to enlighten you with other extraordinary benefits humour brings to a workforce.
So without further ado, let’s roll.
Top 5 Benefits of Humour In Your Workplace
Enhanced Effectiveness
Having a jubilant workspace will help to boost the effectiveness of your organization as a whole.
It will reduce stress amongst the employees and the decision-makers, and will improve the bond between people with different mindsets and perspectives.
The fun emotion also improves productivity, contrary to most organizations’ thinking to pressure employees to extract nectar from them. A strong bond amongst the entire organization will drive better results than expected. Your entire organization will work as a single unit in harmony and not in bits and pieces.
Improved Physical & Mental Space
Humour will help create a better physical and mental space for all the members involved in your organization.
Humour and a great laugh in between work will help to:
- Stimulate lungs and heart
- Remove stress and relax your muscles
- Improve blood circulation throughout the body
- Create a sense of well being
With a healthy workforce, you’ll be able to achieve specific business goals with ease. Moreover, employee retention rates will be at an all-time high because of the happy, positive, and motivating environment because of humour.
Unlock Creativity
No matter what industry you belong to or the size of your organization, creativity is an integral part of your growth and helps separate a business from its competitors.
With a happy and open environment in your workspace, you’ll open all the doors for creativity in the employees working for your business.
The ease of communication with each other will help different people learn from the decision-makers, and grow personally as well as professionally. On the contrary, having a restricted environment and a workspace filled with seriousness and tension won’t unlock its maximum potential.
Trustworthy Environment
Once employees can interact with their co-workers or even higher authorities freely, the level of trust increases immensely.
You’ll always notice that employees gain confidence when their seniors have a good laugh with them, it fuels the energy to work harder, and they feel that they have the support of their higher hierarchy.
On the contrary, if the boss has a formal tone with his employees, it might make a few employees scared to open up freely and be confident to share what’s on their minds.
With the increase in confidence, trust, and support, the inputs and outputs of the employees will increase, your brand will benefit from their ideas, and there will be no one stopping your organization from climbing to the top of the ladder in your industry.
Job Satisfaction & Commitment
Having a positive, cheerful environment will help to improve the commitment, engagement, and participation levels of your workforce.
Your team will be satisfied with the work environment and unanimously work towards scaling the business.
All these overall effects will help attract your target audience and make your brand stand apart from the rest. If you want exponential growth in your business numbers, skip the traditional boring work methodology and switch to humour and laughter.
It’s Time For Some Chuckles
These were the significant learnings that helped me establish India’s leading content writing agency – Apna Writer.
But keep in mind having a cheerful, positive environment doesn’t mean that your workforce needs to be non-serious about the work.
Humour will create an environment that is ideal for handling stressful work situations with more clarity and ease.
So what’s making you wait?
If you want to open the doors of success in your industry, add the missing elixir to your work culture and experience the magic.
