Serious about fun

Nobody puts "must enjoy laughing" in a job description.

We list tools. Frameworks. Years of experience. Growth mindset (whatever that means). But not humor. Not joy. Not the ability to make a Monday feel like something other than a slow-moving punishment.

And yet.

Ask anyone about the best job they've ever had. The work itself rarely comes up first. What comes up is the people. The inside jokes. The time someone brought the wrong cake to the wrong meeting and it somehow became the funniest thing that happened all year.

We remember the fun.

It’s the one thing I keep noticing in the work I do with teams. The highest-performing ones aren't normally the most serious. They're the most relaxed. There's a lightness to them. An ease. A willingness to say "that was a disaster" and laugh about it before they fix it.

The struggling teams?

Meetings that feel like funerals. Updates delivered with the energy of a tax return. Humor quietly exiled somewhere around the third restructuring.

We've built an entire culture around performing seriousness at work.

Serious faces in serious meetings about serious goals. Decks with serious fonts. Language that's been sanitized of any personality. We've mistaken solemnity for professionalism. Earnestness for competence.

But here's what the research keeps confirming, and what anyone who's ever had a genuinely good job already knows. Fun is not the opposite of productive. Fun is often what makes “productive” possible.

When people laugh together, psychological safety goes up. When psychological safety goes up, people say what they actually think. When people say what they actually think, better decisions get made.

It's not complicated. It's just inconvenient to admit.

I worked with a team once that had a ritual. Every Friday, someone shared the worst idea they'd had that week. Not to mock themselves - to celebrate the attempt. To normalize imperfection with a bit of joy.

They were one of the most innovative teams I'd encountered.

Coincidence? Maybe. 

But I doubt it.

The other thing about humor is what it signals. When someone can be funny at work - not cruel, not performative, just genuinely funny - it means they feel safe enough to be themselves. That's not a small thing. That's the whole thing.

People don't give their best to jobs where they have to hide who they are.

They clock in, do enough, and clock out. They save their real selves for the weekend.

And organizations wonder why engagement scores look the way they do.

None of this means turning every retrospective into a comedy show. Or forcing fun with team-building activities that make everyone quietly despair.

Forced fun is its own kind of misery.

What it means is simpler. Let people be human. Leave room for the unexpected laugh. Don't optimize the personality out of every interaction. Hire people you'd actually enjoy being stuck in an airport with.

And maybe - just maybe - stop treating smiles like it's the enemy of ambition.

The best work I've ever done has had humor in it somewhere.

Too many dad-jokes, maybe, but certainly humor. 

A line that made someone smile. A meeting that ended with everyone slightly lighter than when they walked in. A collaboration where laughter was just part of the vocabulary.

It's not a perk.

It's how you know you're doing it right.