Is Humour a Core Skill in Productivity Training?

As we move into 2026, I’ve reflected on a chat I had years ago with a senior banker. I asked him a simple question: where and when were you happiest at work?

It wasn’t the trading floor or achieving an immense KPI rolling out x project. It was when he was 18, fresh from A-levels, working for three months as a labourer on a building site.

“Until you asked me I’d never thought about it. But it was then. And it was because of the banter. It was a really tough job. But I loved it.”

For the banker, working at the building site (making in a year what it would later take a week for him to earn at his bank), the guys had a laugh which enabled them to work super hard but also crucially just made life worth living.

That conversation stayed with me because it revealed something powerful: humour wasn’t a distraction from productivity, it was the engine behind it. Banter built trust, energy, and a sense of shared purpose that no KPI dashboard can manufacture.

Somewhere along the way, many workplaces decided humour was unprofessional. Jokes are risky. Laughter looks like wasted time. Yet without it productivity stalls, burnout rises, and engagement surveys became increasingly feeble.

For me what became clearer through 2025, and feels undeniable as 2026 begins, is that the tide is turning. Teams are rediscovering what builders, nurses, chefs, armed forces and call-centre staff have always known: humour is a coping strategy, a bonding mechanism, and a performance tool rolled into one. At least from my experience, more organisations are experimenting with team building that genuinely involves humour, not forced fun, but permission to be human. And people are more open to it than ever.

Humour does three things brilliantly. It lowers defences. It massively accelerates trust. And it gives people brief but powerful moments of recovery and creativity during the day. A shared laugh can reset a tense meeting faster than any facilitation technique.

So how do we use humour deliberately?

Three practical ways to make work more productive with humour:

1. Normalise lightness in leadership.
   Martin Haley, former CEO of Red Whale (and one of the best I’ve worked with), once told me his most important leadership habit was self-deprecation. By laughing at himself, he removed fear from the room and demonstrated a flat hierarchy. 

2. Design humour into team rituals.
   At Google, teams have been known to celebrate the biggest screw-up of the previous week on Mondays. Not to shame, but to learn. Shared humour reduces blame and keeps experimentation alive.

3. Treat humour as emotional intelligence in action.
   Humour relies on empathy, timing, and self-awareness, which happen to be the foundations of EI. It’s not about being funny; it’s about reading the room well.

The building site understood this long before the boardroom did. Perhaps the next productivity breakthrough won’t come from another framework or magical AI tool, but from giving people permission to laugh while they work.