What Workplace Humour Reveals About Your Team

Many a true word is spoken in jest, right? And so someone says something and you think, ooh.

Dr Allanah Johnston did her PhD on humour at work, and the moment she describes is a familiar one. A remark in a team meeting lands a little too close to something real, and the room has to decide whether to laugh.

Why people joke about what they can't say

A joke carries a concern at very little risk to the person making it. If the room reacts badly, it was only a joke. If it lands, the point has been made and nobody has had to own it. That is why people reach for humour when the subject is awkward to raise formally. Because the remark is easy to wave away, leaders often do.

Of course that can get quickly swept aside, just kidding, you know, haha kind of thing. But it can also quietly reveal things. … In the research that I did, I did find that that would stay with people for a while.

A remark that is still on people's minds well after the laugh is worth treating as a sign of something that matters to them, whatever tone it was delivered in. Her advice:

Don't kind of overreact to it, but it tells you a lot.

In practice that means noting what the joke was about and watching whether it comes back. Asking the speaker to explain it in front of the group would close the channel the joke had just opened.

The gap between stated and lived values

The example she returns to is the distance between what an organisation says it values and what people see it do, which she frames as espoused values against enacted ones.

Going back to my example before about those sort of espoused versus enacted values, there could be a joke about that and it's like, yeah, that is going on here, isn't it?

Values statements are written by the people at the top and tested by everyone else. A joke about the values on the wall is a way of reporting the result without anyone having been asked. The leader hearing it can defend the values, or check whether the behaviour matches them.

Using The Office to start a conversation about bullying

One organisation she worked with wanted to prevent workplace bullying, and used clips from The Office to open the subject with its teams.

They used kind of clips from The Office to sort of basically break the ice… with their teams and to sort of talk through, do you think this is appropriate, is it not?

She expected a more formal approach, such as written case studies, to make honest answers harder in a group that mixed genders and cultures. A likely reason the clips worked is that fictional characters let people disagree about where the line sits without admitting anything about their own workplace.

I have to admit at the time I was quite surprised about this, is it did sort of create a safe space in a way for people to talk through these kind of areas. … It released that sort of nervous tension, sort of got it out of their system a little bit. And then it was kind of okay, well let's actually talk through some of this.

The laughter came first and the discussion followed. She thought it high risk at the time, and it ran as a planned programme with a clear purpose. A manager trying to lighten a meeting is in a different position.

Humour from the front of the room

Don't use humour intentionally. I actually saw leaders trying to do that. … People see when something's not genuine.

Chris adds a condition from his own experience. After bad news, a leader who has built trust can finish a tense meeting with a joke and ease the room, while leaders without that trust have made comments that shut it down. The same line gets two readings depending on what the room already thinks of the person saying it. The test before joking in a hard meeting is whether the room trusts you.

When people push back on a change

Speaking up against a decision also costs something, and a joke costs less. A team whose concerns keep arriving sideways may be showing the leader how expensive the direct route feels.

They often have very good reasons to be resisting change. It might be that they can see something that we as leaders or change agents or whoever can't really see. … It's actually really hard to stand up and push back at something, particularly if you know you might feel like a little bit of a loner doing that.

Her description of how most organisations roll a change out:

A sort of spray and pray approach, which is everyone's been communicated with, you've all been sent an email, you know, so you should all be on board with the change. No.

An announcement shows that something was sent. What people made of it, and who disagrees, only comes back if somebody asks and listens.

Listening when you have already decided

The hardest time to listen is after the decision is made and you want people on board. This is how she describes it from inside the leader's head.

Yes, I'm listening, but I really want you to get on board with this. So I'll just keep listening. But you're not listening. You're not listening. You've got all that noise in your head and you've got an agenda.

Dr Allanah Johnston is the founder of Future Calibrate, a consultancy that helps organisations through complex change and transformation. She spoke with Chris Turkington on the Fireside Leadership Podcast.

This article covers the humour and change threads. The episode also has the rest of the Office story, her description of what a high-trust team looks like from the inside, and the exchange with Chris on holding people to account while listening to them. Watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify.