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During pre-flight safety instructions, Southwest Airlines flight attendants can be heard saying jokes like, “put the oxygen mask on yourself first, then on your child. If you’re travelling with more than one child, start with the one who has more potential or who is less likely to put you in the home.”  

Southwest Airlines is one example of a company that successfully incorporates laughter and fun into its organizational culture. Employees at Southwest Airlines are encouraged to have fun and engage passengers in the same spirit; not because they were told to, but because that’s how they do their jobs. While embodying the company’s values is the primary reason for incorporating laughter into daily interactions, Southwest Airlines has experienced considerable monetary benefits, as well.

An independent consulting group finds that telling jokes during their safety demonstrations results in $140 million dollars of revenue per year. While other low-budget airlines are going out of business, Southwest Airlines boasts 44 consecutive years of profitability. On top of the monetary benefits, their fun-loving culture contributes to their low turnover rate of 4%. 85% of employees say they are proud to work for Southwest Airlines.  

As impressive as the Southwest Airlines statistics are, you may be wondering how you can achieve similar results with your own organization. 

Although creating a culture that revolves around laughter will make the work environment more positive, small changes to culture take a big effort. Though you may not be able to change your organizational culture entirely, taking steps to improve engagement can help reduce the risks of disengagement.

After two decades of worldwide employee engagement research, Gallup discovered only one-third of employees are engaged. When both leaders and employees struggle to achieve a healthy work-life balance, any additional task can feel overwhelming. Engagement shouldn’t be thought of as an obligation, but as part of your everyday organizational culture.

Engagement is about investing in everyday moments; laughter can be easily integrated into your engagement strategy with a few simple initiatives.  

Is laughter really the best medicine?  

The laughter Guru, Madan Kataria, believes laughter promotes well-being and true, cheerful laughter can have a liberating and transformative effect. Participants in what is called ‘laughter yoga’ start with fake laughter which evolves into real laughter as stress is released. Participants describe the exercises as a life-changing physiological release where stress lifts from the body and soul.  

These types of laughter exercises are self-initiated. Prolonged self-initiated laughter promotes the same benefits as spontaneous laughter, but it originates in the nervous system. The nervous system is responsible for communication between all parts of the body — including the brain. Self-initiated laughter provides added oxygen, which stimulates higher overall productivity of the system. This leads to cognitive skill improvements, such as emotional expression, problem-solving, and communication.

Performing cognitive exercises, like self-initiated laughter, can reduce mid-day fatigue and increase overall productivity.  

Dr. Andrew Weil believes laughter is a powerful intervention against illness. Laughter reduces stress levels and blood pressure, while boosting the immune system. Each of these benefits can lead to the increased well-being of employees and can reduce the number of sick days each employee needs. Overall, laughter elevates mood.

According to Dr. Charles Schaefer, a psychologist who studied laughter, adults who act happy for one minute per day are likely to be happy. Laughter releases positive chemicals that help promote connectivity, and when team members feel connected, they not only work more cohesively but they develop stronger bonds. Cohesive teams are more confident in each other, and often experience greater happiness than in cohesive teams.

Happiness can be viewed as a key component of long-term job satisfaction, which increases employee engagement, retention, and productivity.

The answer as to whether laughter is the best medicine is a resounding, yes. The stress reduction benefits alone may be incentive enough to incorporate laughter into your workplace daily routine, but when added to the benefits of team collaboration, productivity, and creativity, laughter becomes an impactful employee engagement tool.   

How to integrate laughter into your organizational culture        

Incorporating laughter and humour into your engagement strategy needs to be intentional for it to become a regular aspect of daily interactions. Implementing just one simple laughter initiative within your team can help to improve both engagement and morale. It’s important when integrating humour into the workplace to develop clear guidelines for safe humour to prevent alienation. The guidelines need to be presented to the employees at the onset of the laughter initiative to avoid confusion.

For example: 

• Avoid religious or political topics  
• Avoid obscene references
• Avoid malicious material
• Avoid making fun of clients, competitors, or individuals

Once the guidelines are established, start by integrating one simple laughter initiative. Choose an initiative based on the current workplace culture and the methods your team members would benefit most from. Laughter exercises that last 10 minutes are more likely to improve engagement surrounding creativity and innovation. Shorter exercises, such as a joke, will still help improve engagement involved with cognitive skills.

Here are three laughter initiatives you can try implementing within your teams today

Don’t be afraid to be creative and experiment with initiatives your team can relate to.    

Take laughter breaks

Laughter breaks promote innovation and creativity. The more stressed an employee is, the less likely they are to contribute creative ideas with confidence. Give employees the opportunity to get together, socialize, and laugh during the workday. This has been shown to increase employee engagement in tasks and increase productivity. Nurturing an environment that encourages laughter and playfulness allows employees to feel recognized and valued, while releasing tension and connecting with others.  

Practice gradient laughter

Gradient laughter is an unstructured exercise that begins with silence and slowly escalates into laughter. As momentum builds, the laughter becomes more natural and contagious. The end result is real, uninhibited laughter. The laughter gives the brain the oxygen it needs to function at a high-level, and relaxes the participants at the same time. If possible, this exercise is a great excuse for your team to take a break outside their regular working environments.    

Insert humour into daily internal communications

There are many ways of inserting humour into daily communications. One simple way of introducing humour throughout the day is through humorous e-mails. These e-mails can be a joke, a funny picture, funny motivational quotes, or even memes. Starting off the day with a humorous e-mail to your team is a great way to ensure everyone’s day starts on the right foot. Finding images and jokes can be time-consuming at first, but you can create a digital folder of images and jokes over time to pull from. Not every team member will find the same jokes funny, but any attempt to add humour will help to ease tension and stress, creating an open communication channel. Remember to keep the humour lighthearted and non-offensive.

Harnessing the power of laughter can stimulate employee engagement and increase the overall well-being of your employees. Southwest Airlines serves as a great example of the benefits of integrating laughter and humour into the workplace. Fun work cultures lead to happier, more productive, and more engaged employees.

Employee burnout is quite common in the modern workplace. In our "get it done yesterday" world, many employees are pushed too hard in the name of company profits. But in the end, overworked team members aren't the only ones who lose. Research shows that the effects of employee burnout represent an estimated 125 billion to 190 billion in healthcare costs each year. And that's just in the United States!

In this blog post, we'll explain exactly what burnout is and give you five tips to prevent it at your place of work. Sound like a plan? Great, let's dive in!

Employee Burnout: A Definition

Let's start at the beginning and define what burnout is. According to the Mayo Clinic, employee burnout is, "a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity."

As you can tell from this definition, burnout is more than just a high level of stress. While stress produces feelings of "too much," burnout is characterized by feelings of "not enough." Employees affected by this phenomenon often feel emotionally exhausted and may lose their sense of purpose and motivation.

There are many things that, left unchecked, could eventually lead to employee burnout. But a few of the main causes include unrealistic expectations, a lack of communication, and bad management.

How to Prevent Employee Burnout

Knowing what burnout is and actually avoiding it are two very different things. To prevent employee burnout at your place of work, follow these five tips.

1. Assign the Right Tasks

First, it's important for all employees to be assigned both the right tasks and the right amount of tasks. A sure-fire way to introduce employee burnout to your workplace is to give your team a mountain of work they hate doing and force them to complete it in an unrealistic amount of time.

Instead, be mindful of each employee's workload. Are you putting too much on any one staffer's shoulders? Also, do your best to match team members' interests and skill sets with the duties you ask them to complete. Your team will work harder, be more productive, and have more joy at work when they're given the opportunity to accomplish tasks they're good at and enjoy.

2. Equip Your Team

Few things are as frustrating as being given a task by your boss and feeling like you aren't able to complete it. If your team experiences these feelings often, they'll eventually experience employee burnout as well.

Fortunately, there's a simple fix: equip your team to accomplish the work you set before them. Give them the proper tools, provide them with any necessary training materials, and make sure they have the resources at their disposal to achieve what you've asked of them.

3. Focus on Company Culture

A positive company culture will go a long way toward banishing employee burnout from your place of work. Do what you can to foster it! Make sure your team supports one another. Encourage socializing between co-workers as company culture is built on relationships. And don't be afraid to get your staff outside the office to have fun together.

If you're able to build a fun working environment that your team enjoys being a part of every day, they'll be much less likely to experience employee burnout.

4. Allow Time to Rest

You may think that in order to get everything done, you need to ask your team to work more, not less. But this probably isn't the case. Studies show that overworked team members are actually less productive. They're also better candidates for employee burnout.

So do your team and your company a favour and promote rest. Allow your staff to take breaks throughout the day, give them a healthy lunch break, and encourage them to take a summer vacation. Also, refrain from asking them to complete work after hours if it can be avoided.

If you allow your team to rest, they'll be better workers, get more done, be more joyful, and be able to better avoid employee burnout.

5. Recognize Your Employees

Lastly, to prevent employee burnout, you need to recognize your team for their contributions. The kind of recognition you give will vary depending on your unique company and circumstances. But in general, make sure that your team is being recognized on a consistent basis, for specific jobs well done. Random, general praise is much less effective.

One of the best and easiest ways to consistently recognize your team in meaningful ways is to use a software tool like Kudos. Our platform makes the entire process incredibly simple.

In Conclusion

Employee burnout is a serious, widespread condition in modern workplaces. Fortunately, you now have the tools to prevent it. Follow the five tips listed above and your team will be much happier, healthier, and productive.

There are few things as simple or powerful as the act of saying “thank you.”

Studies show that daily gratitude benefits individual mental and physical health, while also improving organizational health and business results. In fact, research by Harvard Business School and Wharton shows a 50% increase in productivity when frequent appreciation is given in the workplace.

While a thank you is enough to make someone’s day, here at Kudos, our most successful clients follow a “recognition recipe." Follow these steps to start giving amazing recognition today:

Express Gratitude and Appreciation‍

A thank you should immediately show gratitude. The range of recognition could go from appreciating a thoughtful gesture like bringing in cookies for the office, to recognizing an act that benefited the entire organization, like speaking at an event or hosting a webinar.

Your first sentence could start with something like this:

“Thank you…”

“It really made my day when…”

“You did an amazing job at…”

On the Kudos platform, you can choose from four distinct levels of recognition and appreciation. This proprietary approach to recognition provides valuable insights into individual and team performance. Learn more here.

Be Specific‍

Details highlight the action's value, strengthen professional bonds, and increase the likelihood of the action being repeated. Everyone loves to be recognized for their contribution, big or small, and they’ll appreciate the spotlight on their actions. We’re all a little curious, so we want to know why gratitude is given with all the details.

Describe the Impact‍

Let the recipient know how their contribution affected you or the organization. The goal of this step is to provide perspective on the scope of their actions. You may not realize the full effect of your contribution in the moment, and it’s even harder to gauge in larger organizations, so be sure to highlight how a small act can have big results.

Connect to Values‍

Tie three or four of your organization's values to your message; it helps define how that individual is living the organization’s culture. Tying each recognition message to your core values helps team members be mindful of what matters most. Employee experience platforms like Kudos make this easy by providing a built-in selector for your organizational values whenever you send recognition.

Deep Dive‍

Once you’ve tied corporate values to your employee recognition program, you can begin measuring your culture and changes in your culture quantitatively. Book a call with us, and we’ll show you how to do it!

Try following this recipe the next time you give recognition and see for yourself how effective it is. Better yet, get your entire team or company onboard with giving more meaningful recognition — you’ll see an incredible difference in your organizational culture and performance.

Take a moment to think about your last meeting; maybe it was with your team, your superiors, or your board. Try to remember what you talked about.

Most likely, it was the “hard” side of business – product or service enhancements, financials, and corporate goals. Of course, these aspects of the organization are discussed often, because they are crucial to maintaining your organization’s status in the market.

What is not as readily discussed is the “soft” side of business.The soft side of business refers to the company’s culture, morale, and employee value proposition. Creating and nurturing your culture is extremely important, but is rarely given the same emphasis as its counterpart. This is too bad, because your company’s culture is its guiding beacon. Without direction, your team can fall off course or drift apart; potentially, leading to disengagement and turnover.

While there are numerous suggestions for what your culture should look like, let's focus on how you’re communicating it.

According to Organizational Behavior: An Experiential Approach there are seven ways to communicate culture:

Statements of Principles

‍Hopefully, your teammates have reviewed your company’s mission, vision, and values. But is it safe to assume they can explain the company's purpose and direction? Finding a simple tool that reinforces your company’s values is a great way to help steer the ship.

Socialization

‍Consider how your employees are brought onboard. Are there platforms where they can learn about the people, the company, and the culture? Ensuring you have an effective onboarding process is crucial for creating a foundation and making your teammates’ first day a great one.

Stories

‍What’s on your organization’s highlight reel? No need to harp on old stories, but explaining how the organization came to be and the highlights along the way can give employees a better understanding, appreciation, and commitment for your company. Why not have the CEO or founders create a short video discussing some of these highlights? Not only does this preserve your stories, but new hires will gain abetter understanding of the corporation during their socialization phase. Remember to keep communication flowing afterwards, with leader’s blogs or town hall meetings.

Symbols

‍What comes to mind when you think of corporate culture? If you don’t have a symbol or a mascot, it’s never too late to adopt one. In fact, some of the funniest company stories or minor mishaps can create symbols the whole team rallies behind. Once you have a symbol, consider adding it to company swag to further engrain it into your culture.

Jargon

‍Every company has its lingo. Try identifying words and phrases that connect your team to your vision and values. By actively using these words in meetings and around the office, you can reinforce your uniqueness and ensure everyone is singing from the same song sheet.

Rituals and Ceremonies

‍Regular events spark engagement and interest in your team. Bonus points if these take you out of the office and delve into your communities. Volunteering projects and local functions may leave you with new memories, symbols, or jargon.

Heroes

‍Knowing whom your team idolizes is extremely important. If you don’t know who their role models are – you should ask.

Our industry says: “if you allow your culture to develop on its own, you will get what you deserve.” If you are intentional about how you communicate your culture, you will get the culture you’ve earned.