Humor in the Workplace Communications

Humor in the Workplace

Workplace communications is one of the important aspects that must be addressed by managers on a daily basis in order to create a stable environment in which employees must feel comfortable, and that is intended to ensure the context for them to perform as efficiently as possible. Employees must also bring their input to communication.

However, not all managers take the time to analyze communication with their subordinates, to identify problems, and to develop strategies of counteracting existing problems and preventing potential ones.

In our case, the manager does not contribute to the communication relationship with the other employees. He treats them like simple subordinates, and he only involves on a superficial level in the relationship with the employees. Furthermore, he tends to discourage the usage of humor in the relationship with his employees or amongst employees themselves. Al these lead to tense relationships, stressful environment. This further leads to reduced productivity, lower employee satisfaction, and reduced employee retention.

As an employee that intends to continue his career with this company, I intend to improve my behavior and to try to influence the behavior of others, including our boss, in order to create a work environment that everyone is pleased with. As a consequence, my opinion is that humor would prove to be very useful in achieving this objective. Although two or three weeks are definitely not enough for producing significant change, I think that the following period will create the basis for future changes that will positively affect the communication between us and our boss.

The reason behind involving humor as a means of improving communication at work relies on the benefits that have been observed by specialists who studied the phenomenon. It has been observed that "humor is one of the things associated with a positive affect, which increases not only productivity, but also the ability to communicate well with the boss, co-workers, and customers" (Klein, 2007).

Even so, there are several obstacles that can interfere with the successful implementation of this project. For example, humor can be misunderstood. People can sometimes use humor for communicating something they would not normally transmit. And the receiver of the message associates the bad message with humor.

One of the outcomes expected from implementing this project consists in determining the manager to understand the message transmitted by his subordinates through humor. Even if there are jokes involved, the manager must take the message seriously.

In order to introduce more humor in everyday activities at work, it would be useful to start with a team building session. This would be developed in order to determine employees to reveal their funny side, to become more receptive to jokes made by others, and to create their own jokes, within limits. It has been reported that offensive workplace humor refers to age, sexual orientation, weight, accents, personal hygiene, and work behavior (Scott, 2009).

The manager's reluctance to humor will be a major obstacle to be surpassed. It will probably take more than three weeks to convince the boss to embrace humor as a means of communication at work.

The results after three weeks did not produce exactly the expected outcome, but were productive enough in order to encourage continuing with this project. The team building mentioned above produced significant effects within the work group. For example, participants opened up more on their lives, preferences, experiences, new employees integrated quickly within the group.

One of the most important aspect that was observed consists in the fact that the majority of employees is oriented towards humor, whether from a passive point-of-view, like enjoying other people's jokes, or from an active one, like producing humor.

Integrating humor in the work routine does not presume any disruptions or delays in employees' work. Although the boss was somewhat surprised by employees' change of attitude, he did not seem to agree very much with it.

I also observed that minor conflicts between colleagues were easier and more quickly resolved with the use of humor. Employees have noticed that stress related to their job is somewhat reduced, they feel more free to make certain observation or complaints, using humor, complaints that they would not make otherwise, they feel better about themselves and about their jobs.