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You cant lift your bottom line if you or your people are down !

In 1990 the World Health Organisation declared depression to be world health burden number four and predicted it would be number two by 2020. At the NZ Mental Health at Work Conference in March 2003 it was stated that in any 6 month period 25% of people in this country will have a mental illness. In both developing and developed regions, depression is women's leading cause of disease burden. Depression is referred to as the modern plaque and affects peoples ability to perform across a wide section of activities of daily living. The stresses

of daily living, including grief, low morale and poor self esteem affect decision making, concentration and productivity. The practiced application of good humour in the workplace can aid in the reversal of this modern day malady and create a fun and productive environment.

Humour in business is not about clowning
It is about demonstrating that you are a warm, responsive, intelligent and considerate person. Learning to understand humour is no different to learning to understand any other business communication tool. Humour is a creative tool that sharpens the mind, engenders positive attitudes, fosters friendships, encourages mateship, generates optimism, boosts enthusiasm, restores hope and is simply fun.

Humour takes a positive and a negative form. Using humour in introspection is the first step to overcoming the imperfect and contradictory aspects of business communication. Being able to laugh at yourself enables you to feel good about yourself. Positive humour is constructive, appropriate, relevant and strengthens relationships, whereas negative humour is inappropriate, destroys and alienates. There are three basic types of wit or humour; sarcasm or laughing at others; nit wit or laughing at the wrong time; clowning wit or laughing with others. It is appropriate to aim to be amusing, not abusing.

In the world of comedy, humour is about creating maximum laughs per minute as a measure of success. In business being good humoured is about creating an open, positive, receptive and cheerful mood with successful communication the end product. The greatest challenge for every business leader is finding a way through the human capacity to create chaos, finding the good within each individual and then harnessing that to support business outcomes. By getting out of the office and managing by walking around you will get to know your people and the rewards they want from the workplace .

You can optimize this less formal communication by having fun, being responsive and in the moment. Use all these encounters to generate goodwill. If you made someone else's day every day your business would grow exponentially. All you have to do is catch people doing something right and acknowledge it. Maintain this sort of environment and you would see improved and sustained bottom line results.

The qualities that mark people who excel in real life, who have successful personal relationships, and who are stars in the workplace have nothing to do with IQ. Daniel Goleman US Author of Emotional Intelligence - Why it can matter more than IQ says those qualities include self awareness, impulse control, persistence, zeal and self motivation, empathy and social deftness. These are all evident in people who are good humoured.