Does Laughter Have an ROI?
“Once more he will fill your mouth with laughter and your lips with rejoicing” (Job 8:21).
It’s the Best Medicine
Laughing with my friends at work is one of the best parts of my day. It's usually at ourselves or about something difficult that we're trying to make lighter by poking fun. It would be a much harder job without laughter in the office. This importance of laughter is one of the many points made in the book The ROI of LOL: How Laughter Breaks Down Walls, Drives Compelling Storytelling, and Creates a Healthy Workplace.
Authors Steve Cody, CEO of communications firm Peppercomm, and Clayton Fletcher, chief comedy officer (yes, that's his title) of Peppercomm, are such proponents of laughter in the workplace that they advocate for stand-up, sketch comedy, and improv training for all employees. They want laughter “baked into” the company’s culture and recommend it for all organizations.
This type of training may seem out of the box or downright inappropriate. Still, the authors make a case for comedic training, saying it translates to more empathic employees, better listeners, and a more authentic workplace—even more so as remote and hybrid workplaces become more the norm. Laughter can help establish bonds that a dry presentation over a video call could never accomplish.
Laughter is not just good for the office; it's good for the person. The positive endorphins it produces are “seven times more powerful than morphine.” I hope we can all remember when we’ve laughed so hard we’ve cried and how good it felt. Imagine a workplace filled with laughter!
It Creates Relationship
Cody and Fletcher dispel the myth that too much laughter means employees aren’t working hard enough. They’ve found quite the opposite to be true. Telling a humorous story in an interview can help humanize the interviewer and put the interviewee at ease. It can make a challenging project more enjoyable when the team members joke about it. Appropriate humor in the proper context can raise morale and create a cohesive work environment. “This comes from the innate human desire to be understood, acknowledged, and validated,” they write.
Cody and Fletcher also discuss how companies can use humor in storytelling—in ads and on their websites—to relate to their audience. They note that the stories must be “honest, and equal parts funny and intriguing in order … to produce results.”
It Breaks Barriers
I appreciated the authors’ honesty throughout The ROI of LOL. They use examples of when their humor has slayed the audience and when it’s fallen short. When training employees for stand-up comedy, the key takeaways are:
Be authentic and appropriately vulnerable.
Engage with the audience.
Read the room—be sensitive, and when in doubt, leave it out.
We can all agree that a humor-filled presentation or speech is engaging, because we feel more connected to the presenter, are more relaxed, and are more apt to continue active listening. Humor helps people to relate. It’s authentic storytelling, and it creates a better communicator and a more attentive audience.
I don’t know if I am 100% on board with the idea of every company providing comedic training to its employees. However, I have worked for companies where laughter was commonplace, and I’ve worked for companies where laughter was frowned upon. I would never work for a company again where humor wasn’t an accepted part of the day. The reason is not because of humor per se; it’s because of the importance of having a culture where people feel free to be authentic—to bring their genuine selves to the proverbial conference table.
We are made for joy, and we spend a lot of our time working. Let’s work to the glory of God and enjoy our life as we do it. Let the laughter and joy ring out and infect those around us!
Cathi Kennedy is passionate about building relationships. At the University of Notre Dame, she advises graduate students for the Mendoza College of Business. Her background is in marketing and communications, and she recently received her MBA. Impassioned writer, voracious reader, aspiring knitter. Married to a musician and mom to two amazing sons. Cathi is a convert to Catholicism and seeks to learn something new about her faith every day. Connect with Cathi: LinkedIn • Instagram • Facebook • Blog