As part of a work experiment, I drew a “Laugh-o-meter” on the grease board behind my chair. The idea for this emerged as a coworker would come by on a semi-regular basis and he would make me repeatedly laugh, something that I believe is tremendously important to a healthy work environment.
We would get to talking and I started ranking the levels that he raised my laughs to. “Oh man, you got me cracking up at about a 50 percentile rate.” As this occurred over several weeks, the idea was hatched to begin charting the laugh-o-meter.
The concept is simple. A drew a vertical rectangle, and as the day wears on, and laugher occurs, it gets colored in, with the time of day listed on the side to show the rising barometer.
10:45 a.m., last week’s Saturday Night Live sketch on boys’ dancing is replayed with hand moves and rapping, raising the meter to the 35% range. Later, after lunch, a story is told about camping and rain coming down so hard that a friend on a trip over the weekend ran to the car for protection, yelling she’d had enough. Picturing the woman then texting messages, the car getting warmer because of her body heat and inability to roll down the windows because of the storm, got some more chuckles. At 1:23 p.m., the laugh-o-meter got raised to 53% total for the day.
What began as an experiment became a challenge to keep humor going in the workplace. That’s a lot of pressure to put on coworkers, but they’ve handled it reasonably well.
To add to the experiment (and remember that this is a totally non-scientific study, but still fascinating nonetheless), I began to chart the laugh-o-meter day-to-day. Here’s where it starts to get even more enlightening about our daily behavior if you choose to believe this small, unrepresentative sample.
The first week, Monday was off the charts. My coworker was extremely funny that day, poking fun at things, inventing skits. Laugh-o-meter hit about 30% for the day. Tuesday was even better, as he came by several times to crack me up, sending the graph to its historical high of 78% (a perfect 100% would mean repeated full laughs throughout the day). From there, it dipped the rest of the week, rising slightly out of the basement on Friday.
The next week was fairly similar, minus the blip on Tuesday. Monday started out with some decent humor, then a downward trend until Friday, where it jumped a bit.
The following week, the trend continued, though my coworker was swamped, so percentages were down across the board. His mammoth workload continued the week after that, and the dip on the laugh-o-meter forced it to its lowest levels of the month.
Charting the highs and lows yielded numbers and findings that are significant when you consider the ebb and flow of work. First, Monday tended to have some of the best laughs. Our operating theory is that residual humor is left over from the weekend, and we start the week fresh, so our humor antennas are more sensitive.
Second, humor tended to descend for the rest of the week, bottoming out on Wednesday and Thursday. Again, this made sense in theory, as people get engaged in their jobs and busy and don’t take time to make someone else laugh.
Finally, we get to Friday, where the laugh-o-meter showed a rising trend. Our experts attributed this positive change to the impending weekend, as we begin seeking out more pleasure signals to prepare us for the fun on Saturday and Sunday.
To summarize: Monday – good; declines Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Improvement on Friday.
It sounds like our work week as we get settled, focus, buckle down, then release the steam, doesn’t it? I wonder if I can get the government to fund this as a study? We’ll improve business productivity exponentially with our findings.
We would get to talking and I started ranking the levels that he raised my laughs to. “Oh man, you got me cracking up at about a 50 percentile rate.” As this occurred over several weeks, the idea was hatched to begin charting the laugh-o-meter.
The concept is simple. A drew a vertical rectangle, and as the day wears on, and laugher occurs, it gets colored in, with the time of day listed on the side to show the rising barometer.
10:45 a.m., last week’s Saturday Night Live sketch on boys’ dancing is replayed with hand moves and rapping, raising the meter to the 35% range. Later, after lunch, a story is told about camping and rain coming down so hard that a friend on a trip over the weekend ran to the car for protection, yelling she’d had enough. Picturing the woman then texting messages, the car getting warmer because of her body heat and inability to roll down the windows because of the storm, got some more chuckles. At 1:23 p.m., the laugh-o-meter got raised to 53% total for the day.
What began as an experiment became a challenge to keep humor going in the workplace. That’s a lot of pressure to put on coworkers, but they’ve handled it reasonably well.
To add to the experiment (and remember that this is a totally non-scientific study, but still fascinating nonetheless), I began to chart the laugh-o-meter day-to-day. Here’s where it starts to get even more enlightening about our daily behavior if you choose to believe this small, unrepresentative sample.
The first week, Monday was off the charts. My coworker was extremely funny that day, poking fun at things, inventing skits. Laugh-o-meter hit about 30% for the day. Tuesday was even better, as he came by several times to crack me up, sending the graph to its historical high of 78% (a perfect 100% would mean repeated full laughs throughout the day). From there, it dipped the rest of the week, rising slightly out of the basement on Friday.
The next week was fairly similar, minus the blip on Tuesday. Monday started out with some decent humor, then a downward trend until Friday, where it jumped a bit.
The following week, the trend continued, though my coworker was swamped, so percentages were down across the board. His mammoth workload continued the week after that, and the dip on the laugh-o-meter forced it to its lowest levels of the month.
Charting the highs and lows yielded numbers and findings that are significant when you consider the ebb and flow of work. First, Monday tended to have some of the best laughs. Our operating theory is that residual humor is left over from the weekend, and we start the week fresh, so our humor antennas are more sensitive.
Second, humor tended to descend for the rest of the week, bottoming out on Wednesday and Thursday. Again, this made sense in theory, as people get engaged in their jobs and busy and don’t take time to make someone else laugh.
Finally, we get to Friday, where the laugh-o-meter showed a rising trend. Our experts attributed this positive change to the impending weekend, as we begin seeking out more pleasure signals to prepare us for the fun on Saturday and Sunday.
To summarize: Monday – good; declines Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Improvement on Friday.
It sounds like our work week as we get settled, focus, buckle down, then release the steam, doesn’t it? I wonder if I can get the government to fund this as a study? We’ll improve business productivity exponentially with our findings.