How to use humour to bond your project team (without overstepping the mark)

Building and launching a space telescope is a hugely complex task, fraught with setbacks and intense meetings. So, for Bill Ochs, Project Manager at NASA for its 20-year James Webb Space Telescope mission, humour was a critical component.

“If we didn’t laugh, we’d be crying all the time,” he says.

One employee described Ochs’ staff meetings as “like a stand-up comedy routine”. Colleagues would ask why everyone had been laughing so much.

According to Professor Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at Oxford University, laughter is an evolution of the social grooming we see in primates. Laughter releases the same endorphins, but as you don’t have to be physically hands-on, it is effective in larger groups.

Humour’s bonding power is great for project teams. It can help build resilience, provide a controlled vent in stressful situations and serve as a useful barometer for the health of company culture. It may even help your team to be more innovative.

“Humour is about questioning assumptions, challenging perspectives and taking things in a completely different direction from normal,” says Max Dickens, a comedian and facilitator at Hoopla, which offers corporate improv training. “It’s built on seeing things upside down or differently. So, humour is also a good way to unlock a more creative way of looking at problems.”

But humour at work is a tricky thing to get right.

Here are five things to bear in mind when looking to inject some laughter…

1. Don’t force it

Comedians spend years learning how to be reliably funny in public – often starting from a strong base of natural talent. No one wants a manager who’s desperately trying to get laughs, crowbarring in jokes and making tactless remarks.

Keep it simple and let the humour happen naturally. Try starting a Monday morning Teams meeting by sharing something that happened to you at the weekend. “Rather than inventing and contriving things, we often talk about revealing,” says Dickens. “It's about being yourself a bit more, letting people into the truth of your life.”

2. Don’t isolate anyone

You don't want to embarrass people or otherwise single them out. This is about everyone bonding together. “If you need to pick on anyone, choose yourself,” says Ochs, who says he’d often use self-deprecating language in presentations. For the same reason, don’t use offensive language.

As for mocking the organisation and other structures? To Ochs, that’s fair game. “NASA employees are also federal employees. There’s lots to pick at in government bureaucracy. The one rule I did have, especially early in the mission when others were trying to cancel our work, was that some things had to remain among ourselves. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

3. Be playful

Most of the time when we’re laughing with one another, or even being charismatic in a presentation, we’re not cracking jokes. We’re just showing up with a more playful energy and taking ourselves less seriously.

“Let yourself be more human and more yourself, and you will find that you’re naturally funnier,” says Dickens. “And people will feel funny around you.”

If you feel that humour somehow clashes with your instinct to behave professionally at work at all times, try paying attention to the various performative ‘cloaks’ you’re putting on during the working day. Don’t let your serious side become a straitjacket. Your playfulness is equally valid, and it will help you to connect.

4. Create the right environment

Humour isn’t something to force on people. It happens between them, as a result of rapport. It’s about having a bit of a giggle as a group, and people feeling comfortable.

That means there’s no pressure on you to be the focal point. Simply create an environment where people feel invited to be themselves, and not threatened, and you're more likely to breed a funny atmosphere for everyone.

“Be present with people, listen and affirm their strengths, rather than shooting down ideas,” says Dickens. “These small things might not feel directly on the nose of humour, but it all helps to create the right space.”

5. And if you want to get really technical… break it down

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar and his peers at Oxford University investigated the cognitive mechanism underlying humour, publishing the results as a paper entitled ‘The Complexity of Jokes is Limited by Cognitive Constraints on Mentalizing’. They found the funniest jokes to be those involving two characters and up to five back-and-forth levels of intentionality between the humourist and their audience. Bet you’re not laughing now. Don’t overthink it. Just relax, be yourself and take it from there…