The Value of Hearing Laughter in the Workplace

I can usually tell how one of my chip shops is doing before I’ve looked at a single number, and I do it with my ears. If I walk in and all I can hear is the fryers and the till, my heart sinks a bit. If I can hear laughing from behind the counter, even if it’s at my expense, which it often is, I know we’re going to have a decent service.

I suppose I learned to listen for things long before I sold my first fish supper. My old job in the Royal Navy was hunting submarines, which sounds glamorous, but mostly involved hours of waiting for the one faint signal that actually mattered. Funny how that skill followed me into a kitchen. Laughter is a signal. So is not hearing any.

Laughter is the sound of safety

People don’t laugh when they’re frightened. That’s really all there is to it. A kitchen where nobody jokes is a kitchen where nobody is going to tell you the fridge has been running warm since Tuesday, or that a regular walked out unhappy last week. Everyone’s keeping their head down and hoping the problem belongs to someone else.

When your team laughs in front of you, they’re telling you something without meaning to. They feel safe enough to be human at work. And a team that feels safe enough to laugh is a team that will flag a problem while it’s still small enough to fix. That’s worth more than any suggestion box. Ours mostly collected chewing gum wrappers and one strongly worded note about the radio station, which to be fair had a point.

It’s not about being the funny one

Here’s where I see owners get it wrong, and I got it wrong myself for a while. They think humour at work means they have to provide it. Standing at the pass doing material like a warm-up act. Please don’t. There is no silence on earth quite like a kitchen after the boss has told a joke that died.

Your job isn’t to be funny. Your job is to make laughter welcome, which is a different thing entirely. Mostly it means laughing at yourself first. When I drop something or say something daft, and I do, I want the team to enjoy it properly, not stifle it. Because the day your staff are scared to laugh at your mistakes is the day they start hiding their own, and that costs you real money eventually.

The sound of people who want to be there

Hospitality runs on energy and laughter is about the only form of it you can actually hear. Customers pick up on it too, more than they realise. I’ve never once read a review complaining the food was lovely but the staff seemed suspiciously cheerful. People come back to places that feel alive, and a room feels alive when the people working in it clearly don’t hate every minute of their shift.

I’ll be honest, there have been stretches when my own businesses went quiet in that way. The takings looked fine, but the sound was wrong. I was grinding, everyone could feel it coming off me, and the laughter just sort of dried up. I’d love to tell you I fixed it with some clever strategy but really it was me realising I had to lighten up first. The mood in a small business comes down from the top whether you like it or not. I didn’t like it much when I worked that out.

Start listening

So here’s your homework, and it takes about ten seconds. Tomorrow, walk into your business and just listen. Not to the machines. To the people.

If you hear laughter, protect it, because it’s doing more for you than half the stuff on your to-do list.

If you hear silence, don’t panic. But treat it the way I was taught to treat a faint trace on a sonar screen. It might be nothing.

It’s never nothing.