Humour is a multi-tool, a swiss army knife. It enables you to connect with your audience, it can alleviate tension, elevate status, and persuade others to your point of view, and it can do so & much more. While humour can help you and your message stand out, most of us are hesitant to use it, particularly in our professional lives.

The epiphany of having a cat named cat or people believing that we do. Although it is quite funny and clever the idea of having a cat named cat, but the joke will not last, and will have short shelf life.

Are we being an authentic communicator and being ourselves in communication at our workplaces. Are we able to create the balance required of structure & spontaneity, of hot and cold. It is this realization, we might be a funny person in real life with so much personality, while our work persona would be serious and really polished. Being good at one’s job should not equate to having no semblance of joy or personality, so much so people consider us drab with no colour and may believe we may have a cat at home actually name ‘cat’.

So, how do we bring humour to work, and how it could be a powerful tool to bring joy in the office and feeling of authenticity.

We all have our ways of humour and levity, it may be a mechanism for survival, persisting, or rallying. Our connection to humour is now more important than ever. What can business leaders and managers do in this current environment where everyone is stressed out, working remotely, interacting through screens, what can they do to implement or make it known that there is still a place for humour in the workplace?

We can work on myths or misperceptions about humour. Common myths / misperceptions, that humour is not only not serious, not important, but it would serve to distract and when we ask people what holds them back from using humour at work, most believe that humour simply has no place amidst serious work. People are concerned about harming thier credibility and not necessarily being taken seriously.

Yet most leaders really prefer team members with a sense of humour and believe those employees do better work. Humour affects the way people interact with you, showing your sense of humour can make our peers and our friends attribute even more perceptions of confidence, and even status to you and vote you into leadership roles while also cultivating a sense of trust.

Humour is a powerful tool to build trust which is more crucial now especially when you consider two things. First the remote/hybrid work environments and the second is organisations facing a crisis of trust in/due to such environments. One 2019 HBR survey found that 58 % of employees trust a stranger more than their own boss.

The expectations of today’s leaders are shifting, it used to be that leaders needed to be revered, now they need to be understood. All the while, humour is a particularly potent elixir for trust. Especially, when we laugh with someone, be it in person or even over screens through meet / Zoom, our brains release the hormone oxytocin, and we are cued to form an emotional bond with that person. Oxytocin, by the way, is the same hormone that is released during sex and childbirth. Fun-fact both moments when, from an evolutionary perspective, we benefit from feelings of closeness and trust. On a funny note, the bottom line, giving birth, having sex, and laughing with colleagues in Zoom meetings have a lot in common. We are building trust and no one’s wearing pants.

See we had a moment of laughter together when you read the above fun fact. We have spoken a lot about the importance of engaging others when we communicate, and the above analogy just did that. That is how powerful humour is and can help us with engagement.

Now, you may ask when you should use humour and when you should not. So, humour helps with engagement in part because of laughter, when we laugh, the reward centre of our brains is flooded with the neurotransmitter, dopamine, which helps with deeper focus and better long-term retention. So, in other words, using humour not only can make our content more engaging in the moment, but it also makes it more memorable after the fact. It helps not only in the moment, but in the long-term as well.

Talking long-term, communication essentially boils down to storytelling. Humour, if used right, makes you a better storyteller, and in turn a better communicator and audience retain the impact long-term.

A good story always has a goal. There is an aha at the end of it, when you use humour or you try for a joke or you even just laugh in one context, oftentimes, either implicitly or explicitly, effective humour, there is a goal. It could be to build bonds. It could be to diffuse tension in the room, or it could even just be to spark joy and have fun. But what is interesting in the story-work is the degree to which you dive into the science of story. You start to understand there is always an aha or a goal of the storyteller when sharing a story.

Good stories, they grab your attention and neurologically, we are wired to see things or pay attention to things that are differentiated. Humour is something that makes you laugh, is oftentimes attention-grabbing. It defies your expectations. You think that the joke teller is going in one direction, and then that direction is subverted.

When you share stories in compelling ways or even just co-create stories with others, it oftentimes becomes really engaging. And done well, it is done authentically. And the real magic comes with when the storyteller and the audience are so connected. Good humour as like lifting others up or moving something ahead is often also so engaging, but it really lives between the space of the joke teller and the audience.

Most importantly, the idea of creating some impact on the audience, good stories leave the audience transformed, right? It is not just the protagonist that is transformed in a good story; it’s also the audience.Humour, when done well and not inappropriately; really can transform the audience.

There is an aha (engagement/impact/transformation/realization) behind the ha-ha(humour). So, question now may be, what we can do to create and demonstrate humour?

First is simply recognizing that humour comes from truth. One of the most common misconceptions is that humour involves inventing something from thin air, when you think about it that way, it feels hard. The reality is that it is more often about simply noticing things that are true for you. So how you feel, what is unique about your thought process, what makes you happy or cranky, the sort of oddities or incongruities in your life. All these things can be fertile ground / fodder for humour. It is about giving voice to these observations. And we often laugh at these things from a recognition of truth. “I have done that. I have seen people do that. I have heard people talk about that.” And so, step one is just recognizing that we are not creating things from thin air. We are just mining our lives for these truths.

So, we need to ask, what kind of truths are we looking for? The easiest one for people to access is finding areas of contrast or incongruities and tiny little observations. And finally, specific. So, the more specific you can get, the better. We can do an inventory of our lives, and we can produce things that we can then try to be funny about.

As an exercise that we can do for a week. Every week we must write down seven observations from our lives. Write one observation of an incongruity, something odd, something that you noticed. And then at the end of the week, look at your seven observations and just try to turn one into comedy, but you may ask what about those people who understand the power of humour and levity, but just do not think we are that funny?

Well, first, it is important to recognize that the bar in business is incredibly low. Set a low bar. It starts with, “It is not even about being funny. It is just being more generous with your laughter.” Dick Costolo, who is the former CEO of Twitter, as he puts it, he says, “You do not have to be the quickest wit in the room. The easiest way to have more humour at work is not to try to be funny; instead, just look for moments to laugh.”

And see how you pivot from worrying that I am not funny to something that I can do, which is be more generous and laugh more. So, it is something that gives us a sense of agency and feels like something very real that I can do.

It is also about navigating the world in a slightly different way, understanding the subtle distinction between levity and humour, where levity is a mindset. So, think of that as sort of an inherent state of receptiveness to and active seeking of joy, right? How do you go around the world? Are you walking around the world expecting to be delighted or expecting to be disappointed? And so, what we work on more than anything is this mindset, noticing opportunities for humour that would otherwise pass us by. And it is our point of view in the office /work environments that when you walk around on the precipice of a smile, you will be surprised by how many things you encounter that will push you over the edge.

That notion of being receptive to what is happening in humour around you I think is fantastic. I like the idea of being the precipice of a smile. I would love to live my life in that position.

For effective storytelling, communication, and humour, know your content, audience, and space in between. Well, the space between, it is that magical moment when you have a point that you want to deliver or story that you are sharing or a joke that you are trying out. And there is an audience, right? And so, it is what happens in between my story or my joke or my content and you. It is that in-between space that I think is the most interesting and important.

For effective storytelling, humour, let us get into a successful communication recipe. Number one, lean into your style. If you are shy and understated, lean into that. If you are naturally character-based, charismatic, if you use a lot of hand motions, whatever that is, lean into it and embrace it. We see folks trying to embrace different humour styles that do not feel natural to them or different communication styles. So, whatever your natural style is, lean into it.

The second one comes from, Chris Artel, who authored the book, Moments of Impact. And he talks about, “The last 20 minutes before you do anything, you should only be focused on your state.” So, forget your content, forget what you are there to talk about, and just focus on your state, getting in a good mindset, getting in a positive mindset, recognizing who is in the room. What are they feeling?

And then the third, talk like a human. There is so much jargon, especially in the way that we communicate over email. And if we can strip that out of the way we talk, especially as more of our communications are moving over email and over different forms of electronic communication, if it is not something that you would say in a casual conversation, then do not say it in an email. Those ingredients go into is going to be fantastic. People will be amazing communicators. There is a lot of oregano. You have got to put oregano. That is true, spice it up.

Bottom line: Use humour like oxygen, we all need it. Balance is the Key, being powerful and approachable, kind, but unafraid to challenge, insightful and emotionally attuned, and caring about the needs and wellbeing of the people around. And that will come through in how we communicate and in our presence.