Laughter as a workplace wellness approach

In workplace's all around employee wellness is a major issue because of how often words like "stress related illness" and burnout" are being used in workplaces and in the home. In order to help their employees not suffer from these types of things businesses are doing everything that they can to keep their workforce happy, healthy, and productive. One of the best ways to help keep your employees happy and healthy is to use laughter at work. It used to be believed that laughter at work was a distraction that didn't allow you to get the job done; you had to always be serious at work. However, now we are starting to realize that laughter at work actually helps business because employees are more productive.

In fact, numerous studies have been done on laughter in the workplace. One study has found that managers who had the highest levels of employee performance were the managers that used the most humor in the workplace; they also used it more often than the other managers. Another study has found that laughter plays a huge role in your personal well being because if you laugh 200 times you will have burned off the same amount of calories as 10 minutes on a rowing machine. Another benefit to laughter that helps keep your employees healthy is that after a bout of laughter your blood pressure drops to a lower healthier level than before the laughter began. Laughter can also oxygenates your blood, which helps to increase your energy levels, but laughter also helps to relax your muscles, and provides all of your major internal systems with a workout.

One of the specific indicators that you can use to tell you when to use laughter in your workplace is when you are being placed in a no-win situation. This can include being expected to a job, but not have the necessary resources to get the job done, which can include enough time, money, policies, or people power. A no-win situation can also be when you have to serve a difficult or overly demanding client base or boss or when you have to enforce unpopular rules or regulations at your workplace.

The second specific indicator that you need laughter in your workplace is the presence of unpredictable or uncontrollable stressors. These can take the form of regularly arising, but unpredictable situations that can affect the stress level in your workplace, workloads, or scheduling. They can also include decisions that are made at other levels of the organization that affect your job, but the decisions are made by somebody else and you have no input whatsoever or in some cases you have very little input.

However, if you are going to be incorporating humor into your wellness programs in the workplace you are going to need to have some guidelines put in place. One of the main reasons that you need to put guidelines in place is because of how vague the definition of humor is. You are going to need to be specific about the type of behaviors that you expect to be used towards using humor on the job.

Another reason that you want to put guidelines in place with humor on the job is because you want to make sure that the humor that is being used is appropriate for the workplace. Everybody has a different sense of humor and finds different jokes or situations to be funny, and not everybody is appreciative of this kind of humor. By being clear about what you consider appropriate humor and what is off limits you can prevent any bad feelings between employees because of their differences in definitions of humor.

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