My initial thought was that I didn't like that prescription. But I'd like to know _why_ the author thinks "joke less, laugh less" would help with divisiveness.
I'm not the author, but I was in a Teams chat with my manager and another guy (that we needed help from). The other says something, my manager posts a huge frowny face with no context and the other guy kinda disengaged from the conversation. Privately, I reached out to both. I told my manager their reaction was harsh. My manager said "I was joking, they knew I was joking". The other guy said "I worked hard on that, the negative reaction was completely unwarranted." In the end, I was able to smooth things over, but I wonder if we could've finished up sooner or if my manager cashed in a little too much good will because of a dumb emoji.
I guess the point is, it's not always clear what is a joke (or by extension, what, or who, is being laughed at).
I've been able to laugh and joke around with people I work with from all over the globe (literally), its one of the most valuable tools I have found to create a sense of ease of friendliness in the workplace. Self deprecating humor is also a great way to show that you don't take yourself to serious and to ease tensions when divisiveness may arise. I think the better suggestion is to not talk about politics and don't gossip.
The problem is that what you think is funny may be uncomfortable to a other people, and for some reason, it's always the funny guy who thinks that the onus is on everyone else to shift their behavior to accommodate his comfort.
It gets worse when half the team is laughing, and the other half are praying for you to be struck dumb already.
It's really not that hard to keep your forms of merriment clean and appropriate, if you are a generally good-natured person that likes who you work with and wants to make them laugh.
That said, there are certainly people that can only perform humor as a zero-sum game. But in my experience they are also generally the kind of people that subject their coworkers to uncomfortable conversations in a myriad of other ways.
If you come into a tight culture of people who will riff all day on harmless puns, or crack references to old Jersey Shore dramas, or whatever, it can be acutely alienating.
I wouldn’t personally want to work in a place so sterile, but I also feel confident in my ability to float around and either find a lively culture that suits me or work my way into a culture that once felt alienating.
But not everybody feels so confident in that, and sterile results-focused work communities get the opportunity to have these people thrive.
That sounds good for those people and for those organizations.
As long as the whole job market isn’t made to look that way, I’m not sure there’s a big critique to make.
doesn't 'divisive' generally mean to divide, as in separate into opposing factions? What you're describing seems more like 'diversity', which is pretty different I think.
This particular manipulation of language consists in the confusion of cause and effect.
Diversity of opinions exists. It's good and it's accepted to be good, even if it makes feel some people bad sometimes. Freedom of speech requires effort to accept we're different. To make it sound bad, you need to create a frame where everybody agrees on everything until some evil "divisive" person creates division.
Since it's included with "gossip" I assume it's to avoid insulting people (intentionally or accidentally), but suggesting that humor is off limits entirely is an outrageous over-correction.
Ironically I think the author has included an incredibly divisive opinion in a post about being less divisive, and has therefore dissolved any authority on the matter.
It didn't suggest any such thing though. It said joke and laugh less. It didn't forbid them.
Humor that doesn't offend can be hard to pull off. If you crack jokes regularly, odds are high some of them will be offensive.
Most people are quick to assume you are laughing at them, not with them. So if you are laughing a lot at work, odds are good someone will take that as mocking, as disrespect, as you not being adequately serious about the job.
If you are careful with humor, you can do good things with it. People who joke habitually are probably not being careful with it.
Sounds like maybe you need some new coworkers because where I work we laugh and joke around all the time and nobody ever gets offended (or offers offense).
Most jokes build on shared context, therefore jokes are inherently exclusionary and discriminatory by excluding people without the shared context. Avoiding most humor is thus a good idea.
I guess the point is, it's not always clear what is a joke (or by extension, what, or who, is being laughed at).