{"id":414,"date":"2020-04-15T12:40:14","date_gmt":"2020-04-15T16:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-peopleanalytics\/submission\/did-your-employees-laugh-at-your-joke-%f0%9f%98%82\/"},"modified":"2020-04-15T12:44:22","modified_gmt":"2020-04-15T16:44:22","slug":"do-your-employees-laugh-at-your-jokes-%f0%9f%98%82","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-peopleanalytics\/submission\/do-your-employees-laugh-at-your-jokes-%f0%9f%98%82\/","title":{"rendered":"Do your employees laugh at your jokes?\u00a0?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/span><\/h6>\n
\n

“A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Humor can help you build a more vibrant, creative, inspiring workplace — it\u2019s both a driver of success and reflects success at work. It\u2019s core to attracting and keeping great employees. It\u2019s a stress-buster and is proven to help improve wellbeing. A sense of humor is also a strong trust-builder and trust is core to work relationships across the board. Humor is also a powerful catalyst for creative thinking – therefore can help drive a creative workplace. Research on humor as a moderator of leadership effectiveness found that the use of humor in constructive ways helps shape the nature of the culture we want to create. 1<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So how can you track humor at work?\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

According to Yew et al (2011) 2<\/strong><\/span>, it\u2019s possible to build a relatively accurate Naive Bayes classifier that uses social action data, without the use of content or media-specific metadata, to understand if something is \u2018funny\u2019. On this basis, it could be possible to build up a picture of whether an email, presentation, meeting was perceived to be <\/span>funny <\/span><\/i>based on how someone interacts with it<\/span>. Sisense, a platform that enables developers, data engineers, and business analysts to simplify complex data and transform it into powerful analytic apps, developed a tool that scrapes text for words that are most commonly used in popular jokes to gauge if words or subjects that are commonly perceived as funny are being used. 3<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Should you track how funny things are at work?\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

I would argue that this could be a healthy practice. Having a high-level understanding of whether key all-hands, email announcements, etc. are being perceived in a positive light and are contributing to a positive culture, or not, can be incredibly helpful. At Google, <\/span>googliness<\/span><\/i> is a core trait that\u2019s regularly measured across the organization. It is meant to measure the prominence of the signature positive culture that Google embodies – and a sense of humor is characterized by the elusive concept of <\/span>googliness<\/span><\/i>. Googliness is one of the core criteria in recruiting, but also is held as a standard for leaders and is regularly pointed out as one that is very hard to measure – perhaps a more robust understanding of humor in communications could be indicative of googliness<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I would however push that we shouldn\u2019t be optimizing around humor data. I would hypothesize that over-fitting for humor has diminishing returns. When you try too hard to be funny, it falls flat and this can have negative consequences on culture.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, as was mentioned in the aforementioned article in The Academy of Management Journal, it\u2019s important to be aware of the potentially negative impact of humor, especially when audience expectations and group composition is not considered. This could be captured by cohorting the group and understanding individual sentiment, however this could require identifying information.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hence, privacy violations are a key concern. This is especially the case with the method that requires tracking of commentary on the shared content as well as the sharing patterns. <\/span>Therefore, I\u2019d recommend that only high-level reactions to the degree and type of humor be tracked and if more granular results are needed that they only be used if the sample size is large enough and can be effectively anonymized.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In short, humor is a serious matter.<\/span><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a01 <\/span>Avolio, Bruce J., et al. \u201cA Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Bottom Line: Humor as a Moderator of Leadership Style Effects.\u201d <\/span>The Academy of Management Journal<\/span><\/i>, vol. 42, no. 2, 1999, pp. 219\u2013227. <\/span>JSTOR<\/span><\/i>, www.jstor.org\/stable\/257094. Accessed 15 Apr. 2020.<\/span><\/h6>\n
2 Jude Yew, David A. Shamma, and Elizabeth F. Churchill. 2011. Knowing funny: genre perception and categorization in social video sharing. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI \u201911). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 297\u2013306. DOI:https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/1978942.1978984
\n<\/span><\/h6>\n
3 Roth, E. Analyzing What Makes Us Laugh. Sisense. 2014. <\/span>https:\/\/cdn.sisense.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Most-Popular-Jokes-Data-Visualization.pdf<\/span><\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How do you track if your employees think you're funny? And should you even be tracking that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11785,"featured_media":419,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[431,486,466],"class_list":["post-414","hck-submission","type-hck-submission","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-people-analytics","category-people-management","category-talent","hck-taxonomy-industry-information-technology"],"connected_submission_link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-peopleanalytics\/assignment\/lpa-blog-assignment\/","yoast_head":"\nDo your employees laugh at your jokes?\u00a0? - Leading with People Analytics<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-peopleanalytics\/submission\/do-your-employees-laugh-at-your-jokes-\ud83d\ude02\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Do your employees laugh at your jokes?\u00a0? - Leading with People Analytics\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How do you track if your employees think you're funny? 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