Listen up, lighten up to improve company culture

If you want to instil serious values into your company culture, don’t ignore the benefits of using humour.

If you want to instill serious values into your company culture, don’t ignore the benefits of using humour.

When Magdalena Cholakova, an associate professor at the Rotterdam School of ­Management, studied how one organisation pushed through a transformation effort, she made a surprising discovery: by taking a playful approach to the rollout, which included poking fun at the change program, leaders were better able to persuade employees to go along with it. The conclusion: mocking can help an initiative succeed.

Professor Cholakova, defend your ­research.

Magdalena Cholakova, an associate professor at the Rotterdam School of ­Management

Cholakova: I’m interested in understanding how organisations that are trying to implement change cope with the challenges and the pushback that their efforts often provoke. In this study, one of my graduate students, Marc Gijsbers, and I focused on an initiative that The Netherlands office of PwC — the accounting, tax, and advisory firm — was launching in 2015 called Vision 2020. The organisation had traditionally been keenly focused on meeting its financial targets. But this new “vision” involved telling employees, among other things, that they should also “care” and “make a difference”, which had the potential to feel like a contradiction. Instead of ignoring that challenge, the leaders at PwC chose to acknowledge and even make light of it. And it worked. ­Vision 2020 was embraced. Of course, PwC also used traditional best practices for change management along the way. But it’s clear from our research that humour helped accelerate the process.

HBR: But why did it work? Usually when you make fun of something, you don’t help it, you undermine it.

Well, a leading explanation of how ­humour works is that it combines concepts that are incongruous at first. At PwC, employees had been operating under one set of norms and practices for a long time but were now suddenly confronted with another. Jokes about this situation allowed people to accept the coexistence of two different sets of goals without necessarily resolving their underlying tensions.

This then gave people a chance to make sense of the goals together and gradually understand the tensions and find ways to resolve them. Remember why humour is used in advertising: in many cases, it can make consumers more likely to pay attention to the brand and can help build positive associations with it.

Advertisers publish the ad or air the commercial many times as a reinforcement for consumers. Managers can use humour in the same way to drip new values into an organisation slowly and pleasantly so that they gain acceptance and remain top of employees’ minds.

Can accountants really be funny?

It seems that Dutch accountants can. In fact, humour was already a big part of the culture at PwC Netherlands. Even before ­Vision 2020, associates held regular “cabaret nights” at which they would roast partners and directors. The rollout of Vision 2020 built on that tradition. For instance, one of the new values was “reimagine the possible”. This didn’t mean that PwC was going to become, say, an IT company, but it would mean redefining core values. Managers used the slogan in a gently satirical way: “Jack, the team really appreciates your attempt to re­imagine the possible by putting the PowerPoint slides in the wrong order, but perhaps you can be more careful next time!”

How did the staff members respond?

They used humour, too. It gave many of them a safe way to voice their frustration, and sometimes their cynicism, with this big change initiative by resorting to sarcasm and irony, which prior research has shown can help people process seeming contradictions.

For instance, “I guess we have to reimagine the possible if we want to get all our work done” became a way to express frustration with the challenge of integrating the new demands created by Vision 2020 with their normal responsibilities.

The cabaret nights also allowed employees to vent in a nonthreatening way, following the long tradition of using humour to safely speak truth to power. Think of court jesters and fools. As the humorist Mary Hirsch has noted, ­“Humour is a rubber sword. It allows you to make a point without drawing blood.”

This study looked at one change initiative in one company in one country in one industry. Do you think you’d find the same results in different settings?

That is a great question. As Bauke Sprenger, a PwC partner and our collaborator on the research, initially related to us, even within PwC Netherlands you can hardly expect to find a single organisational culture.

You have different types of people working for the audit, tax, and advisory arms of the company and variety that stems from the industries and clients the firm works with.

An auditor working in health care is by no means similar to an M&A adviser in private equity. Humour may therefore need to take a different shape and expression in each unit in each country, but the key is it’s there.

I’m worried your advice will turn managers into The Office’s Michael Scott. We’ll see cringe-worthy attempts at ­humour.

Yes, we’ve all had experience with managers trying to make jokes and falling flat, and it can be awkward. If you can’t be funny yourself, you can still partake in some of the humorous exchanges happening around you or facilitate others’ use of ­humour. We didn’t set out to study humour per se, but if you want specific advice on this, the recent book Humour, Seriously, by Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas, is a good place to start. What matters most is that the humour matches a person’s own style so it feels authentic, not canned. In general, I think leaders underuse humour. Research has shown that it not only can improve your mood but, more important, also can break the cycle of unproductive thoughts and ­trigger more creative problem solving.

Isn’t the biggest risk with humour ­offending someone?

Yes, some jokes are or can be perceived as aggressions towards minorities and protected classes of workers. But we’re not telling people to show up at work to do stand-up. We’re talking about finding humour in the internal workings of the company.

At PwC, this meant pointing to the contradiction inherent in a buttoned-up company suddenly shifting its attention to aspirational values.

But in a case like that, aren’t you still offending the person who suggested the change initiative you’re mocking? For instance, how did the person who came up with the “reimagine the possible” slogan feel?

PwC was not mocking the initiative itself but, rather, the incongruencies that it brought about in employees’ day-to-day ­activities. It was a safe, non-aggressive way of allowing for the fact that we don’t have to agree on everything right here and now and that change is uncomfortable.

What are some other rules?

Humour should be used carefully — so make sure that most of it is positive and not negative. Research calls this “affiliative” ­humour as opposed to “aggressive” humour.

Think of having a consultant stuck in the red tape of a client, which can engender sarcastic comments such as “We are in Catch-22, the sequel,” or “Kafka must have been impressed with the bureaucracy”.

That’s different from aggressive humour, which would target specific people and may belittle or offend them. The good news is that it’s fairly easy to dis­tinguish between the two.

Want to hear a change management joke?

I think so?

Don’t fear change, my friend … It’s just nickels and dimes.

Oh no. Please don’t print that.

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Eben Harrell is a senior editor at HBR
Copyright 2021 Harvard Business Review/Distributed by NYTimes Syndicate