Watching a silly YouTube video or other short positive interventions can help you overcome the tasks at work you dread.
Otto Beisheim School of Management and Trinity Business School’s team of researchers said when you receive these positive interventions you become more engaged, creative and helpful towards your co-workers.
The paper says that employees cope with stressors and when coping with them employees have to engage in inhibiting, modifying or overriding spontaneous reactions.
They use the example of an IT administrator who has to control their temper when giving out technical advice and when they watch a funny YouTube video, they will end up being more productive throughout the day.
Vera Schweitzer, of Otto Beisheim School of Management, said: “Employees encounter self-control demands in their work where you have to put in the effort to do something else other than the automatic response that you would typically have, for example controlling your temper.
“These self-control demands actually impair your effectiveness at work.”
The researchers looked at something that everyone could do daily so that these demands do not get on top of you.
Schweitzer added the funny YouTube videos broaden your scope of attention making it much easier to detach from a negative event that has just happened.
People who took part in the study mainly worked in office jobs, education and customer service sectors.
Wladislaw Rivkin, of Trinity Business School, added: “What makes our study particularly interesting is that we can take out the sector the employee works in and we can claim that our results would be the same for any employee who faces self-control demands.”
He added because of the prevalence of the demands, the question is what can employees do as we know the stresses of working life are detrimental to people’s well-being.
Schweitzer added: “When we thought about the form the intervention could take we wanted to do something that does not include more effort for the employee.
“Something that was different from ‘detaching from work’, that was something simple and easy as pressing play.”
The videos they used featured Charlie Chaplin being stuck in a lion cage and Mr Bean changing into his swimming costume at the beach.
The recommendations that the paper makes are that employers could make daily recommendations of videos or post a joke of the day on their intranet.
Both of the researchers admitted that comedy was subjective to each person and in a real-world application employees would have to choose content that was funny to them.
The paper adds that if employers follow through on the paper employers can ‘foster employees effectiveness even when they cannot reduce the self-control demands of the work’.
Featured Image Credit: Matt Moloney via NegativeSpace under CC0
