ROI is not an acronym I would have referenced even five years ago. Not to mention CPL, B2B, EOD or KPI! Back then I even found LOL a little cringe. And who would have thought the word cringe itself would someday be used not only as a verb, but a noun and an adjective too?
Oh the times they are a changin,’ thank you Bob Dylan. Not just the times, but me too. As cliche as these verbal shortcuts have become, I do appreciate that they are often the fastest way to communicate your thoughts. And this can directly affect the ROI of conversation. The less time you have to spend talking to people the higher the return on your energy output.
I’m a little concerned how easily that sentence just came to me. After all I want LOC (acronym!) to thrive, but I’m afraid of transforming from a human invested in connecting with people to an automated "B2C person," or worse a "C2C person,” who forgets how to be a living, breathing “H2H." Someone who remembers not to take everything so seriously.
Are there any safeguards against drinking the big business kool aid and keeping our sense of humor?
I actually thought that I had made up that H2H abbreviation - I meant Human to Human. But someone thought of it first! With a very different concept. H2H is actually shorthand for Head-to-Head. According to the Cambridge dictionary, - H2H is an abbreviation for consumer-to-consumer: "relating to the buying and selling of products, services, and information between individual consumers, especially over the internet.“ There’s no mention of humans anywhere.
If human to human was never considered, it’s unlikely that my contribution to the business lexicon, L2H - Laughter to Human - has much of a shot. In my world we would evaluate our L2H as earnestly as our ROI. In fact, studies show that people who laugh with each other at work, not just at Funny or Die videos alone in their cubicles, feel more connected, experience greater trust, innovate at a higher rate and drum roll please…deliver a higher ROI!
Some institutions of higher education are on to this and run courses to help ambitious students harness this power. There’s Humor, Seriously at Stanford. At Cornell they run a class simply called Laughter, and even Harvard Business School's very popular Talk class spends a chunk of time dedicated to the use of humor for better conversations.
It’s summer and maybe you don’t want to throw a bucket of ice on your head - so let’s start a new challenge, we’ll call it The L2H Challenge. Once a day make someone - or yourself - laugh. You don’t have to be a comedian to do this. Just do something a little unexpected, workshop your celebrity impersonation, make a noise like a squawking bird, dance like Snoopy in a Charlie Brown video, (At 2:05 if it’s EOD and you’re in a rush!). Don’t be intense about it, just once a day be a little silly.
We’d love to hear it or see it in action! @laughteroncall
