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Event Review

It's not often you can drink beer, watch live comedy and, at the same time, learn how to improve the performance of your business. Yet this is exactly what 200 members of the London Business Forum (LBF) were able to do at The Comedy Store thanks to Richard Reeves and Neil Mullarkey.

Reeves is an economist and author who recently spent two weeks Making Slough Happy for the BBC2 documentary of the same name. Too good-looking for academia, too imaginative for the City and too posh to be an out-and-out "creative", he's ideally placed to take a rigourous look at the softer side of business.

Mullarkey, by contrast, is one of the leading lights of British improvisational comedy. He co-founded the London Comedy Store 21 years ago; still performs regularly on stage and screen; and advises organisations on creativity and communication. He also dresses terribly - the deliberate wardrobe malfunction for this event was a white shirt covered in red blotches, which made him look like a shotgun victim.

Both men were very funny, very knowledgeable and able to offer the attendees a surprising amount of practical advice. Each took a turn speaking - and won raucous applause - before sitting together to field questions from the audience.

The other star of the event was the venue itself. The Comedy Store looks like a jazz club at first glance - low-ceilinged and pleasantly gloomy. But its small stage is brightly lit and, being at the same level as the audience, is clearly designed to promote audience participation. Several attendees were dragged reluctantly in front of their peers during the event, but all found the experience less embarrassing than they expected... and highly relevant to their day-to-day work.

Mullarkey was our warm-up act. Sticking loosely to the topic of happiness in the workplace, he managed to get us all snorting beer through our noses. Then Reeves appeared, to tell us that while happiness was a fun subject to study, it was something all employers should take very seriously. "I not only believe that business can nourish the soul and bring happiness and well-being, but that it damn well ought to," he said. "It's part of being in a good society."

There is now reliable survey methodology for monitoring national levels of happiness, he said. If you plot these levels against national wealth then you find that countries get happier as they get richer. However, happiness seems to reach a plateau once the average GDP per head reaches $15,000. In other words, "once a country is as rich as Portugal, getting richer makes no difference to how the people in that [country] feel."

The harmful implication of this trend, Reeves said, is that "we continue to run our country and our economy and our businesses as if... economic productivity and growth are the means to the end, when they are not any more." Indeed, this quandary was predicted in the 1930s by John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, when he said: "Within the next 100 years we'll solve the economic problem. We'll have enough money. At this point we'll be faced with the permanent problem of mankind, which is how to live wisely, agreeably and well."

Research shows our top sources of happiness rank as follows: (1) family relationships, (2) job satisfaction, (3) community/friends and (4) health. "To crudely summarize the data, if you hate your job, you're likely to have a lousy life," Reeves said.

One of the reasons why job satisfaction is so important is that "work provides a lot of people's social relations," he added. For the past 30 years, one of the best predictors of job satisfaction has been a positive answer to the following question: "Do you have a close friend at work, yes or no?" The idea of sociability at work is not only central to people's sense of wellbeing, he suggested, but to their sense of connection to the organisation.

Sociability and solidarity. These are the two key attitudes you should aim to build among your staff, according to Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones, authors of The Character of A Corporation. "Sociability is essentially the friendship-quality of social networks," Reeves explained. "Solidarity means working together for the benefit of the organisation... a sense of shared purpose." You can only build these attitudes if people talk frequently and meaningfully to each other at work, he said.

Mullarkey agreed. He cited Dr Daniel Goleman, the author of Social Intelligence (and another recent LBF speaker), who argues the highest performer in an organisation is not necessarily the person with the highest IQ score but the person who has the biggest network. "This network is often social," Mullarkey said. "It's informal... research shows you're more likely to help somebody with whom you've had some sort of contact."

Both speakers suggested organisations should actively try to promote socialisation in the workplace, as a means to facilitate networking, boost happiness levels and, ultimately, increase productivity. For example, Mullarkey cited DreamWorks, the US film production company, which provides its employees with a free lunch every day and insists they take an hour to eat it - precisely so they meet people from other parts of the company. The principles of improvisational comedy can also aid communication at work, Mullarkey argued. "People think improv is just crazy chaotic but, as you'll know if you've seen an improv show, there are certain things that are prepared." In addition to the venue, the schedule and the games to be played, there are certain conventions that make it easier to turn dialogue into jokes.

"My friends at Ashridge Business School, who do a lot of work about improvisation in business, call [this] minimal structure/maximum autonomy," he said, explaining that in comedy, as in business, you need enough structure to feel comfortable but enough autonomy to feel you can make a difference.

At the heart of good improv is the concept of "the offer," he said. "An offer is something somebody gives you that you can do something with." This could be a word or an idea or a gesture - anything your interlocuter can use to make a "counteroffer" and take the joke further.

To demonstrate these principles in action, Mullarkey pressed a reluctant audience member, Don, to join him on stage. The pair would imagine they were plumbers, and improvise some dialogue in which every sentence had to be begin with the words "Yes and..." The purpose of the game was to demonstrate that one could create fertile ground for invention, constructive criticism and humour by avoiding the words "Yes but..."

The resulting scene was, to everyone's surprise, a laugh riot in which shower lotion and foot hygiene were given a homoerotic subtext, and in which Don emerged as a latent comedy genius. Afterwards, Mullarkey pointed out that his insistence on "Yes and..." had made Don feel comfortable, because it necessarily created offers that could be used to take the story further. The characters were "sort of arguing," he pointed out, but there was complete trust between the two performers. And the only time this trust came under threat was when Don accidentally set "Yes but...", thereby creating a "block" in the conversation.

"The 'Yes and...' approach encourages us to listen to one another," Mullarkey concluded. "People are giving you offers all the time. I work with pharmaceutical reps and, quite often, they don't listen to the many offers the doctor may be giving them... simple things in their family lives or anything like that. They're too busy trying to sell their products."

The technique can also be very helpful in situations such as staff appraisals and negotiations, where saying "but" can easily be misinterpreted as a personal criticism. Ultimately, trying to make your workplace happier is not something that is easy to "manage for directly," Reeves said, but you may find it helpful to observe the acronym TEC, which stands for "time", "energy" and "conversation".

People want to feel in control of their time, which is why flexible working has become such a highly valued perk in recent years, he argued. "Give people control of their time, and all the evidence says they'll feel better about their work, better about themselves, better about the business, better about you - and everybody will benefit."

Energy, meanwhile, is an essential quality of leadership because "you can tell from the buzz of an audience or an organisation how well it's going to do." Reeves pointed out that Gail Rebuck, chief executive of Random House, and Jack Welch, former CEO of GE (and yet another LBF speaker), both saw energy and the ability to energise as key parts of their roles.

The hugely positive effect of good conversations was clear from Mullarkey's games with the audience. And Reeves said it was equally clear at BT, where he was asked recently to help raise levels of employee engagement. "If you improve the quality of social interactions in organisations, people feel better and they become more productive," he argued.

The final major piece of advice from both speakers was to switch off personal communication devices wherever possible, to overcome the "hurry sickness" of the modern organisation. "The most important skill, I think, for successful, happy people in organisations of the future," Reeves concluded, "is [having] the courage and self-discipline to realise these machines have off as well as on buttons."