The Soft Skill You Need: How Authentic Humor Boosts Workplace Productivity and Drives Performance

Humor has often been treated as a landmine in a professional setting. According to a study by Tony Kong, professor at the Leeds School of Business, it’s time to pause that thinking and instead treat humor as a soft skill you can use to get ahead. 

“There’s been a surge in research,” said Kong. “People are realizing humor plays an important role in negotiations, leadership, teamwork and culture. It’s also important to people’s health and well-being.”

-University of Colorado Boulder, CU Boulder Today, Want to Get Ahead at Work? Learn to be Funny by Katy Marquardt Hill

This doesn’t mean politically incorrect jokes and inappropriate pranks will vault you to your next promotion, but it’s worth looking at the stats to see just how much humor can help you at work.

No Joke: Boost Performance, Morale, and Culture with Strategic Humor

Being funny can lift some heavy boats in a business. These include:

• Building team morale, managerial and leadership effectiveness
• Boosting team creativity and performance
• Creating a better organizational culture

Humor can help build team morale by fostering a more relaxed, inclusive, and collaborative atmosphere, naturally strengthening bonds among colleagues. For managers and leaders, using appropriate humor is a key component of leadership effectiveness, as it enables them to appear more relatable, approachable, and trustworthy. 

This relational approach helps to defuse tension, facilitate negotiations, and ensure directives are received positively, ultimately boosting overall engagement and a more positive organizational culture.

Regarding creativity and performance, the cited study found that in work environments with low job insecurity, humor was positively associated with performance. In work environments with high job insecurity, there was no relation between the two. Unsurprisingly, in an environment with high attrition and mass layoffs, humor doesn’t help productivity.

Deploying the Right Humor Styles

If you need a litmus test for whether or not to tell a joke at work, consider if it is a prosocial or antisocial joke. A prosocial joke includes everyone, whereas an antisocial joke is something that excludes someone. A joke about a specific generation, such as baby boomers or Gen Z, is likely off-limits. Telling a funny story about the weird casserole your Aunt Martha made at Thanksgiving is something everyone can get behind, as long as Aunt Martha doesn’t work with you. 

Mainly, you want to look at jokes that unite rather than divide, and this quick vibe check will tell you if it is a workplace-appropriate story. 

Timing is also key. Testing your sense of humor at formal events, such as earnings calls or board meetings, is not recommended. There’s a time and place for yuks and most people have the emotional intelligence to know when that is.

How To Develop Humor and Authenticity

Before you start exercising your “humor at work” skills, you need to ensure you’re pairing it with authenticity. As soon as you ditch the always-on professional persona, you’ll be surprised at how much better your work relationships get and how your productivity improves. By making this shift, you are not only improving relationships but also seeing a tangible rise in output — a change that Prodoscore can measure. 

A stiff, formal self that is separate from your personal self will always feel unnatural and out of place to professional colleagues. If you incorporate a little more of the personal with the professional, authenticity will naturally appear. 

If you’re in a managerial position and have always been formal with your direct reports, you’ll want to start small, as a complete 180 would be jarring. Start sharing little things here and there, crack a few appropriate jokes, and generally try to lighten up. But don’t expect employees to laugh at your jokes. According to Kong, forced laughter can contribute to job dissatisfaction. So if you don’t knock one out of the park, let it drop and move on. 

Kong also suggests that business schools offer courses on humor in the workplace, similar to the one Stanford offers. Alternatively, consider going to comedy clubs or shows. You don’t have to feature yourself on open mic night; just enjoy some time in these spaces and take note of workplace-appropriate jokes that you can share at the office. 

Speaking clubs like Toastmasters can also help you build the confidence you need to tell jokes in the first place. Successful deployment of humor is all about confidence, so anything you can do to build that will also help you be funny. 

If funny is not your thing, don’t fret, it’s not a requirement! However, adopting a more laid-back approach may be what you need to drive productivity and performance and improve culture.